


Don't Is Not the Same as Haven't

by Impractical Beekeeping (Impractical_Beekeeping)



Series: Songs of Expedience [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bees, Blind Character, Crime Scene, Dysfunctional Family, Experimentation, Friendship, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Content, Sherlock becoming Sherlock, Story: The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, Unspecified University, indistinct boundaries, vintage Mycroft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-16
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-14 09:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 46,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/513943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impractical_Beekeeping/pseuds/Impractical%20Beekeeping
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock Holmes told John Watson he didn't have friends, it wasn't the same as saying he never had.</p><p>In 1995, he steps on a dog's paw in a darkened chapel. The resultant wound is a minor thing, but the friendship he forges with Victor Trevor will leave scars for years to come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_Regent's Park, London, 2010_

* * *

 

They’ve taken over one of the tables at the Garden Cafe and John is absently watching an argument between two squirrels over a piece of bread when it happens.

Sherlock is going on at breakneck speed about the mineral composition of a very specific sort of mud found only in Cornwall. John is listening, of course, but mostly in the uncomprehending way that one listens to the rain, music in the pentatonic scale, or any other unpredictable force. At intervals, he arranges individual crisps on top of the empty bag at tantalising angles, hoping that Sherlock will eat them if he makes their appearance on his side of the table look like a happy accident.

Abruptly, Sherlock stops talking in mid sentence, and not because he has taken the cheese and onion bait laid out before him. He is staring intently at something in the distance just behind John, so John turns to look as well. It’s a man in his mid-thirties, perhaps: tall, a bit stooped, and fair-haired. He’s wearing a Harris tweed suit in shades of brown and grey. The dog at his side is a retriever of some kind, cautious for all of its leggy, gangling youth. And it would have to be, because its leather harness is the kind with a handle, and the man clutching it is very clearly blind.

John turns back to Sherlock, who is continuing to stare, all thoughts of sediment forgotten. “Sher-” he starts to say, but like a striking snake, the consulting detective’s gloved hand has shot across the table to cover his mouth. John pries his fingers loose savagely, desperate to get the taste of leather-and-god-knows- _what_ away from his lips. “What?” he hisses. “It’s only a-”

Sherlock holds up an admonitory finger, and pulls his phone out of his pocket, frantically entering text while John waits in frustrated, mystified silence.

After a moment, he shoves the phone across the table. _He can’t be allowed to hear me,_ the message in the text box proclaims, punctuated by a blinking blue cursor.

John raises his eyebrows and gestures towards his own mouth. Sherlock is staring at the blind man again, so John laboriously types, _am I allowed to talk?_ He pokes him in the arm with the phone when he is done. Sherlock glances down at his message and nods, making a _but kindly keep it down_ gesture as an immediate addendum.

John leans across the table, doing damage to the remaining crisps and whispers, “So you know this man.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes, the word _obviously_ unspoken. “Fine, okay. So...are we looking at some sort of criminal?” Sherlock frowns and shakes his head.

The man has proceeded to sit at one of the neighbouring tables, and has opened a book. The dog lies down, placid but watchful, under his master’s chair. The blonde stranger runs his fingers over the pages, and John watches in silence for a moment. He seems innocuous enough. “An old client?”

Sherlock crinkles his brow in a way that could be construed as noncommittal, so John forges on. “What, then? It’s clear you don’t want to be—” John stops, having been about to say _seen._ He clears his throat. “Observed.”

Sherlock nods again, and slides the phone back into his coat. He surges to his feet and glances at John, a look he knows well to mean, _Coming?_

John sighs and heaves himself out of his own chair, collecting their empty lemonade bottles and the crisp packet. On an impulse, he sweeps the untouched crisps off the table where they can be appreciated by the squirrels later.

By the time he’s disposed of the remains, Sherlock is away down the path, coat snapping in a wind of his own making. With a backward glance at the stranger, who is still placidly reading, John races after him.

They don’t stop until they’ve reached the Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Fountain. Sherlock puts his foot on one of the steps and pulls out his phone again, scanning for messages.

“What...the... _fuck_...was...that?” John pants, leaning against a basin. Sherlock begins typing a reply to something, and doesn’t answer.

“Seriously, Sherlock. What the hell?” At this, the detective looks up.

“That,” he says, “was Victor Trevor.” As if that’s an answer of any use at all, he turns, hands thrust into his pockets, and continues on his way.

It will have to be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally posted as a standalone. But I couldn't resist my blind Victor Trevor, so now it is something else entirely.


	2. Bitten

_University, 1995_

* * *

The notion of fleeing to the chapel, when it comes to him, is struck through with a surprising urgency.

A chapel is meant to be a place of sanctuary. Hopefully, at this hour, also one of silence and solitude. That is something Sherlock needs rather desperately. Lying in the dark, splayed like a broken carpenter’s rule over his bed, he cannot think past the ticking clock on the table, the discordant voices and arrhythmic footsteps in the hall outside. Never mind the _thinking;_ he can’t even _breathe_ straight. If breath is linear. Is it?

No.

 _Go away, go away, go_ ** _away,_** he repeats silently, in varied time signatures and intonations, all of them adamant, but in the end, he’s the one who has to go.

 _Give me a month’s supply and I’ll throw in some plausible errors in spelling and grammar,_ he’d said to David Finch in the library earlier that day. When he’d opened his mouth in possible indignation, Sherlock amended this. _For verisimilitude. It won’t do for either of us to be caught, will it?_ The rules are immaterial to him, but there’s no sense in spoiling the deal. It might prove worth repeating.

In two hours, he’d produced a stack of neatly handwritten pages, carefully seeded with common errata and naive conclusions. It was a minor work of art.

Very minor.

Following his knock, Finch appeared in the doorway, pale hair flopping into his red-rimmed eyes, and said, “Oh. It’s you.” He glanced back into the hazy room behind him and added, in drowsy pique, “What is it? You said you didn’t need my revision notes.”

Sherlock drew the sheaf of neatly handwritten pages out of his coat and snapped them before him like identification papers at a border crossing. “Oh, I’ve finished it. Didn’t take long.”

Finch blinked at him. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Nine.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“It is for me.” Sherlock handed him the first page, and waited for the recipient of his largesse to scan it.

“Jesus,” he said at length, shaking his head. “Okay. Wow.” He backed into the room. “Come in.”

The room was so dimly lit and smoke-filled that Sherlock had felt an impulse to stoop as he entered, as if it were a cave or a bunker. A somewhat prosaic cave at that, despite the fairy lights on the ceiling and the Hieronymus Bosch print—a sadly predictable _Garden of Earthly Delights—_ over the sofa. Below it sprawled an unfamiliar ginger boy in a paint-spattered flannel shirt and torn jeans. “Hey,” he said.

 _American, scholarship student, striving to appear bohemian. Dull._ Like Finch, the stranger was well on his way to permanently fogging an unremarkable brain with cannabis.

There was something almost desperately middle-class in the way Finch glanced apologetically at the biscuit wrappers on the coffee table and the misshapen glass vase on the floor.

 _No,_ not _a vase_. Obviously.

“Sorry. Um. Sit down if you like. I’ll just go and get them.”

He did not deign to sit, but had instead folded himself upright against the wall beside a battered bookcase full of comics, science fiction paperbacks, and glossy remaindered art books with the reduced price tags still affixed. From the stereo, a man’s voice mumbled and wailed about unwanted advice and having some sort of complaint.

“You aren’t Annie,” the ginger remarked lazily. Sherlock said nothing.

“I’m Marcus,” he continued. “You a friend of Dave’s?”

“I’ve just written his psychology paper.”

Marcus nodded. “Cool.” He looked Sherlock over for a unit of glacial time, and then sank back onto the battered, sage-green sofa. He was wearing someone else’s trainers, which was very nearly interesting, until, abruptly, it wasn’t.

Sherlock drummed his fingers against his thigh with increasing urgency and pressure until Finch returned, bearing an amber prescription bottle. “Sorry,” he said again, handing it to Sherlock. “Can I...?”

Sherlock unscrewed the lid. Thirty pale orange tablets tumbled gently within. “Yes. Good.” He thrust the remainder of the paper into Finch’s hand and pushed off the wall, eager to leave.

But Finch stood between him and the door, flipping through the pages at an excruciating rate. It seemed unlikely he was in any fit state to read them.

“Of _course_ I’ve cited the references.” Sherlock tucked the plastic bottle into his coat pocket. “Thanks. You won’t get full marks. That would be suspicious. But you’ll pass. Copy it out when you’re sober; you might retain something useful.”

Finch stepped back to let him by. As he left, the stereo’s volume increased, but not quickly enough to cover the sound of a voice saying, “God, he’s weird.”

Following this, the rest of the evening had been less than satisfactory. His new acquisition was extended-release, so he’d smashed two tablets under a suitably massive pharmaceutical desk reference. That might have been amusing. It wasn’t. Because unfortunately, Sherlock hadn’t bothered to plan anything past the point of consuming them. He’d hoped that inspiration might be revealed.

It wasn’t. And now, if the pills are having any effect at all, it isn’t one he’s cognisant of.

For someone with a notoriously keen mind, he has been strangely bereft of occupation lately. The problem with being (yes, he’ll admit it) a bit _obsessive,_ is that, lacking an appropriate (or even inappropriate) subject upon which to focus, the drive remains, inexorable and meaningless. He feels like a cancer, untidy, and consuming (or consumptive). It is a senseless waste of resources.

But it isn’t senseless, is it? Not if he defines “sense” in a sensory, rather than an intellectual—

_Oh, shut up._

The problem is _,_ that without a focus, pretty much everything tends to become awful. Every tiny sound, amplified. Every colour, a direct assault upon his optic nerves. Tactile things are far, far worse. It is as if every fibre of his clothing, every skin flake, is magnified to SEM levels: rope-like, monolithic, and gritty. He’d be tempted to rip his clothes off altogether (thus also, perhaps, escaping the pervasive oily stench of Finch’s study), but then he’d probably end up fixating on the unavoidable reality of his own body, which could, at this point, be even worse. He’d be disgusted by the sight of a single hair erupting from an arm or a leg, by the sickening shudder of thin skin over arteries.

He could leave. He could go outside, where it is reasonably cold and dark. He could smoke, and out there, where the air isn’t quite so dangerously still, it might feel less like he is coating the skin of his face and hands with a greasy, acrid film. There would be no unpredictably-timed feet in the hall—a sound which his stupid brain insists upon interpreting as invasive and threatening—or submarine white noise when he covers his ears to stop the ticking in the moments in between.

Yes.

Like ripping a plaster off a wound, he throws himself to his feet, stumbling in the process because his blood is too slow to keep up. He rushes out the door and down the hall as if borne on a violent wind, out and down the steps, past the shapes of people and things: vague, sharp, muted, and reflective.

Awful.

Crunching down the path (horrid), then whispering over the grass (a different sort of slippery horror), he pauses, lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. The first inhalation is like a rasping sound or an unexpected stab of pain. It shifts things, subtly alters colour and sound. It’s a focus, a filter.

And with it comes a return to words: _No it isn’t, no I can’t,_ ** _no,_** in a strange rise and fall that resolves at last into the _hey wait_ of the song that had been playing in Finch’s room.

That’s wretched, so he walks on, fast and relentless in counterpoint to the voice, sucking down the rest of the cigarette as he goes.

He slips into the chapel, which is dimly lit and smells of old wood and dusty stone. It’s dark, but not as dark as he’d like. He stalks down the aisles until the pews no longer rise massively before him, each distorted and abrupt in the semi-darkness, despite appearing at anticipated intervals. Now he slows and stretches his hands out to feel the way forward, until at last he sees nothing at all.

_Good._

He sits at first, huddled, knees to his chest, but in time, he wants nothing so much as to stretch himself out like a funerary effigy, so he does. The cold, the dark, the hard surface beneath him, all combine to create precisely the sort of blank security he’s been yearning for. He folds his hands over his chest, presses his shoulder blades gratefully down into the ancient wood, and sternly overrides the rasping guitars in his head with achingly slow cellos.

After a time, they’ve become so real that he doesn’t hear the new sounds at first. Or he does unconsciously, but then he replays them, delayed: the soft sound of the door, the faint echoes of footsteps. The slide of leather soles and a strange accompanying click and patter that he cannot quite identify. He’s thankful that, reclining as he is, he won’t immediately be discovered when, inevitably, the light is switched on and everything is ruined.

But it isn’t. There is just the measured advance of footsteps and their odd accompaniment, like something in a dream. A bad one; a nightmare, because as they approach, he feels unaccountably paralysed. And yet, with the appearance of adrenaline, his brain is thrust into a higher gear. It seizes upon the small, brisker steps, and assigns the word _dog._

So, a caretaker. He’ll have a torch. It occurs to Sherlock that he doesn’t actually know whether his own presence here falls within the bounds of permissibility. He could—A thousand half-articulated excuses flit before him, as he awaits the inevitable beam of light, but—oh. Even in extremity, he notes that he cannot detect the jingle of keys. Or of a lead, for that matter.

So. A man with a dog, but no lead. Because those jingle, don’t they? Alarm has become something else altogether. He’s curious. Consumingly so.

Carefully, and as silently as possible, he swings his feet down to touch the floor, hands grasping the oaken edges of his seat. The steps continue towards him, and when they are so close he can hear the dog panting, a voice above him speaks. “There’s someone here, isn’t there?”

Sherlock’s eyes have adjusted to the darkness, so he can make out a faintly sketched tall grey shape (a man) and a paler one below (the dog). The voice is pleasant, tenor and not at all alarmed, merely inquisitive. Something pale, a hand, comes down to light on the side of the pew, questing. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” the voice continues, now with what might be an added note of defensiveness.

It occurs to Sherlock, belatedly, that he ought to say something. “Ah. Yes. Strange place to walk a dog, isn’t it?”

The stranger sighs. “It really isn’t.”

“Isn’t it?” Sherlock locates his lighter in his coat pocket and flicks it open. The other man flinches slightly at the sound, and Sherlock can now see that he is tall, has messy, slightly curling fair hair, and the sort of aquiline, smooth-browed face that wouldn’t look amiss on a stolen marble frieze. His expression is, however, marred by a faint frown.

“I won’t say anything,” he says. _Disapprovingly._ “About what?” Sherlock asks.

“Clearly you’ve come here to smoke something, which, incidentally, seems like a remarkably stupid risk to take in a chapel. But it’s fine. I’ll go.” His hand tightens on the — _oh._ On the leather handle anchored to the dog’s harness. No jingling; not a lead. Of course.

“Clever, but wrong,” Sherlock says, in a rush. “You smelled the cannabis on my coat— not mine, I was merely passing through it, picked up a bit of smoke. You heard the lighter, and leapt to the simplest conclusion. Of course. Only, as it happens, it’s quite dark in here. I needed the lighter to see. And it’s obvious to me now that _light_ is completely irrelevant to you.”

He springs to his feet, holding the lighter closer to the other man, who looks—what? Baffled? Annoyed? Oh. And that’s odd, isn’t it? His eyes are a very pale blue, so it’s easy to see, as Sherlock advances, that his pupils contract slightly at the approach of the flame. Not much; it isn’t very bright. But it’s discernible.

“What are you doing?” the stranger says, clearly sensing movement. Sherlock waves a hand before him, just to be sure. His eyes don’t track the motion.

“It’s cortical blindness, isn’t it?” he breathes. “Fascinating.”

“Yes, of course.” He sighs again. “I’ve no idea _how_ you know that, or why you should care, but it is. Now if you don’t mind—” As he speaks, he pulls away from Sherlock, who, drawn by the siren call of new information, moves to stop him—

—only to tread on the dog. Its paw, to be precise.

There’s an agonised yelp like a squeaky boot on linoleum, a growl, and an abruptly searing pain in Sherlock’s calf before he has time to collect himself. He twists away and falls backwards into the pew, striking his head against the side.

“Oh god,” he hears from the diminishing space above him. “Oh hell.”

 


	3. Someone to Talk To

Sherlock does not so much lose consciousness as briefly suspend it. When he opens his eyes, of course, it is still dark. He is lying on his back, and something damp is sponging his face. 

“Stop it, Gladys!” a man’s voice says, and cool dry fingers replace what he now realises must have been the dog’s tongue. Sherlock's facial muscles flinch beneath the hand carefully investigating his forehead, and the voice says fervently, “Oh, thank god.” 

“Interesting name for a dog,” Sherlock remarks, raising his own hand with some effort to scrub at the dampest bits of his face.  

“Never mind that. Are you all right?”

He runs his fingers over the back of his skull and silently reviews the properties of several elements (including atomic weights), the names of the railway stations between the university and London, and the date. He has no idea who the current Prime Minister is, but then it occurs to him that he’s never bothered to find that out, so it’s fine. “Yes,” he says, with authority. He sits up.

“Because I’m afraid you’ve hit your head—”

“It’s fine. Really."

“—and did my dog bite your leg? She’s never done that before. I’m so sorry! Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says honestly, after a moment of reflection. He pushes up his trouser leg and attempts to examine the wound by feel. “But I don’t think anything’s missing.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“If I am, it’s not much.”

“Do you want me to get someone?” the stranger asks. 

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Sherlock says, thinking of any number of reasons why he’d rather not come under medical scrutiny. “But perhaps you can help me feel around on the floor for my lighter.” 

“Of course,” the other agrees. “Gladys, lie down.” 

The two of them creep over the dusty stone, until at last, with an exclamation of triumph, the lighter is found. 

“Thanks,” Sherlock says, and flicks it open. He stretches his leg out and notes that it appears to be more bruised than anything. In the time that has passed during their search, the pain has receded to tolerable levels. “It looks as if she’s only just broken the skin,” he reports. “Given Gladys’ occupation, I think we can rule out any possibility of me contracting something truly nasty.”

“Absolutely. Her life has been a dull one. She eats, sleeps, and tries to keep me from stepping into traffic. I think this is the most excitement she’s ever had.”

Sherlock pulls his trouser leg down, and flicks the lighter closed. “I did tread on her foot. She had every reason to bite me.”

“I suppose she was startled.  Well. She seems to be sleeping now,” the stranger says. Indeed, a faint whistling snore is emanating from the floor by their feet. “I’m terribly sorry, but in all the commotion, I quite forgot to ask your name.”

“Sherlock Holmes.” 

“Victor Trevor.”

“So, Victor,” Sherlock says drily, after a long silence. “I’m not good with small talk at the best of times. This situation falls well outside the bounds of the little etiquette I’ve managed to retain—”

Victor laughs. “You don’t think someone, somewhere has written _The Young Gentleman’s Guide to Being Bitten?_ ”

“I doubt it. Seems a shame.” Sherlock had originally intended to say, _and really, I think I’d better go now_. He doesn’t.

“I’ll have to add writing that book to my list of things to do, then,” Victor says. “I admit I am a bit curious about what you were doing here all alone in, as you say, the dark. I come here fairly often, and this is the first time I’ve encountered anyone at this hour.”

Sherlock shrugs, pointlessly, as no one will see him. “I fancied a change of scenery. Thought I’d be alone.” After a moment’s thought, he adds “You weren’t here to _pray,_ were you?”

“Me? No. I’m a bit undecided on the whole deity thing, to be honest.” Sherlock imagines a sheepish smile as he says it.  

Then he wonders what it must be like to never know what other people’s faces are doing. It would be worse than telephones. 

“No, I come here to get away from other people,” Victor clarifies. “If I don’t escape occasionally, I find them unbearable.”

“A sentiment I share,” Sherlock agrees. “Most people are hateful, boring, or both.”

“That’s an extreme viewpoint.” 

“Not really. So many of them are concerned with things that don’t really matter.”

“True, I suppose. Well then. What are you concerned with?”

“Answers.” 

“To what?”

“Anything. Everything.” Sherlock considers. “Three weeks ago, a man was found dead, in a tree, twenty miles from here. No signs of physical trauma, they say. But if I could see the body, perhaps I’d know how he got there.” He clasps his hands together and adds, more slowly, “Puzzles interest me. Crime interests me.”

“In an intellectual, rather than a vocational capacity, I hope,” Victor says. He doesn’t sound particularly alarmed.

“Very much so. Take murder. Forensic science is still in its infancy because humans are so terribly unobservant. They see things, but they fail to comprehend them. As a result, murderers run free. Even some of the stupid sort.”

“Ah, but you're unusually observant, aren’t you? You certainly have no qualms about stating what you see. Most people are made very uncomfortable by the fact that I’m blind. You’re not. You went so far as to name the precise nature of my...defect.”

“It was obvious. Your pupils are reactive to light. Either you are merely _pretending_ to be blind—and why would you—or your occipital cortex is damaged. Having eliminated the first possibility, only one possible conclusion remains.”

“That’s, ah, a bit unsettling.”

“Sorry,” Sherlock says. It occurs to him that he’d really rather not offend this new acquaintance. It’s an unusual feeling to have. 

“Why should you be? It’s perfectly true, and I don’t mind it being mentioned. I am awfully tired of people being sorry. They offer unwanted sympathy, act as if I’m a child, or treat me as a sort of morally fashionable accessory. It’s as if my blindness makes me something other than human.”

 _Other than human._ Sherlock knows precisely how that feels. He has been, so often, made just that. A brilliant creature—except for those times when he’s being a stupid creature, a horrible creature, or an excessive creature; sometimes all of these at once—but nothing human. Not a person. 

He is so often too much or too little. He kills conversations effortlessly, and not always because he means to. Increasingly, he does mean to. There’s so little point in trying.

Talking to Victor Trevor, though, is easy. Sherlock is forced to conclude that Victor is fascinating in a way that most people aren’t. 

For one thing, he’s difficult to interpret. There’s something timeless about him. His clothes are tasteful and not at all fashionable. Chosen by someone else, perhaps, but quite distinctly his. Victor sounds like someone more conversant—more at ease—with the culture of the past than the present. It’s clear that, despite the odds against it, he is extremely well read. Better yet, he can think.

If he thinks Sherlock is a freak, he doesn’t show it. 

It is only natural, then, to talk for hours, in a seamless, quicksilver flow. Sherlock forgets the dog bite, his cigarettes, and anything that isn’t now, isn’t them talking about absolutely everything.

As grey light streaks through the chapel windows, Sherlock stares at Victor: openly, unblinkingly—an unusual luxury—and thinks, _Your eyes see me but you do not._ The novelty is captivating. 

“I hear birds,” Victor says, a moment later. “Rosy-fingered Dawn spoils another evening’s entertainment.”

“Rosy-fingered dawn?” Sherlock repeats.

“Nosiest of all the Homeric gods.” Victor smiles ruefully, and adds “I suppose, though, that this means I’d best return and get myself sorted out before my tutor sends out a search party. People do seem to get unaccountably worried when they think they’ve misplaced me.”

“Yes, of course,” Sherlock says. Even to himself, he sounds disappointed. 

“Is it _too_ strange if I say that I’m glad this happened? Not the dog bite, obviously. The rest of it. Meeting a sort of intellectual kindred spirit, I mean.” Victor is feeling about for the dog’s harness as he speaks, but his face is turned towards Sherlock. “Do you agree?”

“I...yes. Certainly the best time I’ve ever had in a chapel. Not that the bar was set terribly high before now.”

“So we should do it again?” Victor’s smile is open and warm. 

“Absolutely,” Sherlock agrees, without hesitation. 

“Walk me home then, so you know how to find me in future. You can see where I live and tell me if it’s as hideous as I suspect.”

The woodwork in the entrance is knobbily Victorian, twisted and dusty with age. Victor and Gladys ascend the (yes, hideously-carpeted) staircase, stately and small as they recede into the distance. Sherlock represses the urge to call them back. 

After all, he will see Victor again. He’ll do anything in his power to repeat the splendour of the best conversation he’s had in months. Possibly years. He makes his way back to his own residence, drawing gratefully on his first cigarette in hours. His stomach complains, but he ignores it. He’s too busy rearranging bits of his self around the concept of having, potentially, an actual _friend._ How strange. How glorious. 

“Returning to your crypt, Holmes?” His reverie is interrupted by Sebastian Wilkes, an easy contender for Upper Class Twit of the Year. He’s decked out in his (stupid) rowing singlet at the moment, but it’s only a matter of time before he trades it all in for an undistinguished career in banking, just like his dear old dad. He is clearly none the better for a night’s drinking. Sherlock gives his athletic career five months, if he’s generous. 

There is no need to be generous. “Try not to be sick on your blades, Wilkes. I hear the other girls find it distressing.”

“Fuck you,” Sebastian says, but he’s clearly late to practice, and doesn’t have the time to engage in further vitriol. 

Sherlock permits himself a small, victorious smile and walks on. He amuses himself, as he so often does, by imagining Sebastian transfixed with arrows, like the saint of the same name. It suits him.


	4. Benzene

Sometimes Sherlock loses time. On a good day—he knows because he’s measured this—he’s a human chronometer, accurate to the fraction of a second. Sometimes. Sometimes things get stretched or compressed. Seconds become hours, or hours flash by as if they were seconds. It’s a matter of focus. 

The glowing red numbers tell him that he’s been staring at (through) this battered chemistry text for an hour. 

Benzene. C6H6. Symmetrical. Circular. 

Perfect. 

Pointless.

He should sleep at some point, but he hasn’t managed it, yet again, nor is he likely to. He’s nearly finished Finch’s little bottle of pemoline by now, and he’s not sure how (if at all) it affects him.  If he’s more driven, he doesn’t feel it. How much is more, when the baseline is already excessive?

What he has now is a blazing headache, and the realisation that he is consumed with restlessness and has still accomplished nothing of any importance. He has been pressing informational levers like a rat in a dopamine experiment, but with less reward. He has done all the available work that matters (if, in fact, it does matter). 

He knows the course material; he has for years. No new information to be had there. True, he has access to more equipment, chemicals, and biological samples than he’s ever had before. The challenge lies in accessing them without the constant distraction of other students, without suffering through tedious prerequisite explanations, without supervision. 

Sherlock doesn’t mind the university itself, conceptually. It has potential. But like a good museum, he’d enjoy it more if it were largely free of other people.  Perhaps then he’d regain his trajectory. 

And then what? He’s starting to get dangerously bored with it all. It isn’t enough to know things, to state the obvious, without credentials. He skips ahead like a scratched record track, and it’s always painful to be dragged backwards, again and again, brought down to a stuttering speed so the explanation makes sense to everyone else.

Do it again, but this time, write the proofs. Don’t race on to the interesting bits; plod through the irrelevancies at lecture speed.

Mycroft once said, _Try to suffer fools silently. At least for now._

Mycroft is so much better at that. He can do patience and social niceties. He’s a testament to the power of control. If _he’d_ been the one to go to the police about Carl Powers, they might have taken him seriously, never mind his age. Sherlock, of course, had charged off in a frenzy, so consumed with his certainty that he resembled an unguided rocket. They didn’t give him the chance to explain it all properly. As a result, someone managed to get away with murder. Justice had been thwarted.

Sherlock, much as he fails at convention, has a very strong sense of justice. It eats at him like acid, and always has. It destroys him when people don’t see that things are wrong, when they don’t care. Perhaps it’s easier, more peaceful. He doesn’t know; he can’t switch it off.

At the same time, there are so many things that he’s told he ought to care about and can’t, a void where other people find meaning. It’s the curse of genius, apparently. It’s not possible to fit it all in. Care too much about some things, run out of space for everything else. Information is bad enough. Sometimes he feels like he’s reached maximum storage capacity. He forgets things that other people know, or he never absorbs them to begin with. He could read before he could tie his shoes. The former was a necessity, and the latter was not. He’s been told he has a faulty sense of priority, but it’s not something he’s been able to change. 

He’s made it this far.

It _is_ reassuring to know that he is finally capable of having a friend. Sherlock had tried it before, but he had to pretend to be someone else. That’s not a viable option in the long term. But Victor doesn’t care if he smiles at the right time. He doesn’t mind it when Sherlock can’t stop talking, impelled by the incredible force of his own thoughts. It might have helped that his first impression wasn’t a visual one. Sherlock isn’t good at the social mask (which isn’t, probably, supposed to be a mask at all). 

They don’t agree about everything, of course, but Victor doesn’t seem to find that necessary.  It’s odd, actually, that Sherlock has found someone he could be rude to without lasting damage. But then, almost unaccountably, he manages to avoid it, because he wants to. Victor listens. He asks questions. He isn’t ever stupid.

Talking to him is like being in a pleasant, slightly shabby room, one full of old books and interesting photographs. And that’s an interesting thing in itself, the concept of a room that doesn’t physically exist. Victor has elaborate maps and blueprints in his head, things that help him navigate without sight. They’ve discussed the Method of Loci, and Sherlock has begun to build a mental palace of his own. It’s soothing, filing things away inside a complex where everything has its designated place. It’s rather beautiful. This might make sanity possible, building an organisational system. It might relieve the pressure.

It’s not possible, of course, for them to spend all their time together. They both have obligations to meet, for education’s sake, if nothing else. Unlike Sherlock, Victor gives eating and sleeping a reasonable priority level. The good thing is, he can be persuaded to accommodate Sherlock into his own schedule. This is useful. It puts things into context so he doesn’t miss tutorials and labs.

Now, unfortunately, Victor is revising for a massive exam.

It’s not something Sherlock can help him with. Sometimes he does help, when the system lets Victor down and he needs something read aloud. “I like your voice,” Victor said, and it was glorious. 

Being liked for anything is not something Sherlock expected. Never after the age of  five, when it became suddenly clear that he was going to be more of a trial than an asset. He has taught himself not to care what people think of him, but now that someone thinks well of him, he can see that this was something he had wanted, all along. 

It’s probably dangerous.

Victor doesn’t know about Sherlock’s pharmaceutical experiments or what he does to support them. Sherlock knows, without asking, that he wouldn’t approve. It isn’t recreational, so much as medicinal, but that might not matter. Sherlock doesn’t alter his personal chemistry for entertainment; he does it for optimisation.

The sooner he can be done with university, the sooner he can be free to do things that matter. He will burn, but he will burn with purpose. 

Unless he gets it wrong.

* * *

Days later, he gets it wrong.

Very wrong.

Exams ended, and Sherlock took things a bit too far. He’d finished the pemoline, and in exchange for a truly brilliant paper—for a third-year student with money, connections, and  urgent party plans— he ventured into the world of standard amphetamines. This was a step too far, because rather than letting things wind down and sleeping occasionally like a proper human being, he elected to keep going. 

He thought he got away with it. The rush receded, but then things started to look wrong. Sound wrong.

Just now, it’s very bad indeed, because while he’s certainly awake, it’s as if his awareness has knocked a window through into a horrible place where unspeakable shapes writhe just beyond the edges of his visual field. His heart hammers in his throat to an undecided rhythm, and when he fumbles with his jacket, his hands are shaking so hard, it’s nearly impossible to get his arms threaded into the sleeves. 

He has to survive this. He can’t do it here.

He stumbles out into the hall and that’s worse. The figures in the wallpaper writhe. The door knobs all glisten like eyes, and he has to close his own. He has to brace himself against the wall, and _oh_ , there are people.

“Holmes!” Sebastian’s voice, superior, grating, brazen, slams into him like a fist. “Studying the wallpaper now?”

Sherlock opens his eyes, and he’s there, much too close, reeking of beer and cologne and perfume and—“Just fuck off,” he says, savagely. 

Sebastian smiles, all silky, smooth-haired hatefulness. “Why? I live here.”

Sherlock wants nothing more than to rip the smile off his face by force. He looks at him, and the words pour out in a rush. “Get away from me, Wilkes. Go back to your sad little party, with your sycophantic friends and your squalid little entertainments. Susie Harrison, was it? Yes. In the loo—that’s classy—against the door, and oh, what a disappointment! You shot off too early, and she was sick on your shoes. She’ll tell all her friends, of course... So much for that social set. You’ll have to try their ponies in future.”

Sebastian is no longer smiling. “You’ve made a mistake, you little piece of shit,” he enunciates precisely, hands forming fists. “You have no idea how big.”

“Go wash your hands,” Sherlock spits back at him. “They’re unhygienic.” For some reason, this is immensely funny, so funny it eclipses the fact that he’s being threatened—more by the wallpaper than by Sebastian or his filthy hands.

He laughs and he laughs, and Sebastian backs away, eyes wide. “Jesus, you should be sectioned.” 

“Why, so I can be stained?” Sherlock peels himself off the wall, still laughing. “Oh god, the state of your trousers. I’d suggest burning them.” 

He laughs all the way down the hall, only stopping once the night air touches his face.

It’s almost all right, after that. He can do this. Get to the chapel, find Victor. Sit and talk until everything’s fine. He can manage.

He can, until he reaches the chapel door. Then the shapes in the wood, the iron over the oak, twist like snakes before him. He’s forced to stand on the steps, swaying, hands outstretched and useless. He stands, and he shakes, and the shapes dance on. It’s petrifying. He could become a tree, rooted here, swaying forever, gnarled and reaching into the sky like the nymph that fled from a god. 

Victor could tell him her name. He would remember. 

“Victor,” Sherlock says, and he hates the reedy timbre of his own voice, but it’s all he has, so he says it again. “Victor.” He repeats the sounds until they lose all meaning. He says the word until his feet break free, and he sinks down onto the steps, becoming smaller. 

He is going to die here, he knows, weeping with bleak certainty. He will die, and his friend will not be able to find him, because only his outline will be left, etched against the stones. Victor won’t know where to read the signs with his hands. Sherlock will be lost forever, and what a terrible thing that will be.

He explains all of this to Gladys when she pushes her wet nose against his hand, inquiringly. She smells strongly of dog, more so than ever before. He tells her this.

Gladys isn’t permitted to lick his face. They’ve been very clear on that point in the past, but she seems to have forgotten, possibly because he’s on the ground. “You’re not supposed to,” he begins, but someone lays a hand on his back.

“I—oh,”Sherlock breathes, because he isn’t sure that English works any more. Quite possibly, he has been speaking to Gladys in French all along. She doesn’t speak it, of course. Dogs don’t. Mycroft does, though. _Victor_ does. 

“Sherlock,” Victor says, and he’s there now, folded down onto the ground beside him where it might not be safe. He touches his friend's face with pale questing fingers that smell of lemon and tea. “Sherlock,” he says again, and Sherlock sobs with the overwhelming relief of being found.

“I.” He tries again, and gentle fingers skim his eyes, his trembling mouth. 

Gladys whines, nudging against his knee, against his hands, clenched over his knees so he can hold himself together. “I’ve made a mistake,” he manages at last. “I’m not...”

“Not what?” Victor asks.

“Not safe. There’s something in the... There are shapes in the door.” As Sherlock says it, he winces, because he knows he sounds completely mad. 

He _is_ mad. 

“Ah,” Victor says, and because that’s how he is, he asks, “What sort of shapes?”

So Sherlock describes them. This is difficult; they resist being pinned for his scrutiny.

“Well. I’m glad I can’t see them. They sound horrid.” He sighs, and squeezes Sherlock’s shoulder, briefly. “I think we’d best get you back on your feet. You should sleep.”

He can’t, though. “I’ve forgotten how. I can’t—it isn’t—I can’t go back.”

“Can’t go back to your room?” 

“No.”

“Right. You could come to mine. I don’t mind.” 

Sherlock says nothing.

“Only I don’t think you should be alone,” Victor adds quietly. “Not like this.”

“I shouldn’t _be_ like this.”

“It will pass,” he says. “I’ve every confidence it will. Come on.” He straightens up, and Gladys springs to attention, leaving Sherlock small and cold against the stones below.

“You don’t need to look after me,” he protests, although he can’t conceive of anything worse than remaining here on his own. “I’ll be fine.”

“Come with me, and we’ll make sure of that.” Victor waits for Sherlock to remember how to stand, and when he does, he asks, “Is this all right?” and offers him his hand. 

Sherlock takes it, rather awkwardly, and it _isn’t_ awful, although he is acutely aware of the firm, cool pressure of Victor’s fingers over his own. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and follows meekly along. 

Then he freezes, because there is still something flickering around the edges of his eyes, something leaping like tongues of dark fire in the trees.

“What is it?” Victor sounds alarmed.

“They’re still there,” he admits.  “The shapes. I thought they’d gone, but they’re still there. I see them.” 

“Ah.” Victor tightens his hand around Sherlock’s. “I think your brain is interpreting visual stimuli pretty badly,” he says. “Can you...” He frowns, face outlined in the moonlight. He could be a stern marble emperor. It’s reassuring. “Do you trust me?” 

“Yes,” Sherlock says immediately, because he does. Of course he does.

“All right. I've never done this, but...it could be interesting. I’ve got Gladys, and you’ve got me. I think you ought to close your eyes so we can lead you home.” 

“Close...my _eyes,”_ Sherlock repeats.

“Yes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll stop. Is that okay?”

Sherlock nods, curses himself, and then says “Yes.”

He tucks his hand around Victor’s arm, and they take a few slow experimental steps with Gladys' help. It isn’t easy, but the task of synchronisation is a welcome distraction. 

“I know. It’s rubbish, isn’t it?” Victor remarks, in a matter-of-fact way, after their first stumble over a crack in the path. “But you get used to it.” 

They make their way, very slowly and cautiously, to Victor’s hall. It’s a relief that Sherlock can open his eyes by then, because otherwise, the stairs would present an impossible challenge. He grips the railing, just in case.

“You,” Victor announces, opening the door to his room and feeling for the switch he doesn’t need, “are going to lie down.” 

Sherlock baulks at this. “What, on your bed?”

“It’s that or the floor,” he says drily. “That’s Gladys’ domain. You’d regret it.” 

“Where are you going to sleep, then?”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to share. Is that a problem?”

Sherlock has never shared a bed with anyone other than Mycroft, and that was over ten years ago, on a camping holiday in Wales. Their only camping holiday. “No.”

“Make yourself at home, then,” Victor says, turning back to the door without his dog. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Sherlock takes off his jacket and shoes, stowing them in a corner so Victor won’t encounter them catastrophically upon his return. He knows the room rather well by now: music CDs lined up on their shelves with unerring precision, the boxy computer terminal on Victor’s desk, and stacks of books that are oddly elongated, because Braille takes up more space on the line than printed text does. 

He _has_ sat on Victor’s bed before. There’s only one chair, after all. It just seems peculiar to lie down on it. People don’t, generally, share beds with their friends. Then again, most people probably don’t give themselves sleep deprivation psychosis, either. Because that’s almost certainly what he _has_ done. Sherlock is lucid enough to see that now.

If the snakes come back, though, it would be better not to be alone.

He sighs, and scratches Gladys’ head. She isn’t allowed to sleep on the bed, but she is curious about his presence there. 

Eventually, Victor returns, bearing a small glass of water. “I thought you might need this,” he says. He hasn’t changed his clothes; just washed up a bit. 

Sherlock sits up and accepts the glass. “I’m not sure Gladys approves."

“She’s just jealous.” Victor removes his own shoes and socks, puts them carefully away. “Do you want the light off?”

Sherlock isn’t sure, but he says yes. He pushes Gladys off the bed with an apology, and slides over towards the wall. He hopes he won’t feel trapped there.

Victor switches the lights off and gets in beside him. “You’re meant to get _under_ the blankets,” he says, after a moment. He’s still in all his clothes, like Sherlock. Perhaps it's an exercise in sympathy.

“I suppose so.” He doesn’t move.

“Getting any better?”

“Maybe.”

"I must say, that all sounded very Lovecraftian. Nameless horrors and all that.”

“It sounded what?” 

He explains H.P. Lovecraft, and Sherlock isn’t sure he should have asked. Victor is good at telling stories. It’s the things with eyes and tentacles that do all the damage.

“Sorry,” Victor says, sensing his friend going stiff with anxiety beside him. “Not the best choice on my part.” 

“I _did_ ask.” Sherlock thumps his head against his pillow.

“Don’t. We shouldn’t both have damaged brains.”

“Might be too late.” 

“I think you’ll detoxify with sleep. It’s all just chemistry, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” 

“Well. You’re good at that.” Victor yawns, and adds, “Maybe just don’t let it get quite so far along, next time.”

Sherlock doesn’t mention the drugs. He settles for an easy truth instead. “Moderation isn’t my strong point.”

“No, but at least you know that about yourself,” Victor says. “One out of two isn’t bad.”

“One out of two what?”

“Precepts. I was thinking of the ones carved on the pillars at Delphi.”

“The oracle?”

“Exactly. One said _Know thyself.”_

“And the other?”

 _“Nothing in excess.”_ Victor yawns again. “Oh. There’s a third one, actually; I forgot. Most people do. It’s a bit less catchy: _Make a pledge, and mischief is nigh.”_

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep?” Sherlock ventures.

“Seems as valid an interpretation as any I’ve heard.”

After a long silence, Sherlock says “Thank you.”

“Hmm?”

“For what you did. It was kind.”

“S’all right,” Victor says, the words muffled by his pillow. 

“Still. You didn’t have to.”

“I did, really.”

Sherlock listens to Victor falling asleep, to Gladys’ strange whistling snore down below them. He visualises constellations, moving to silent music through the darkness. He thinks of benzene, closed and perfect.

Later, when he is seized by a sudden and pervasive feeling of dread, so terrible and inexorable that he cries out, Victor turns and strokes his hair until it goes away. 

Finally, as grey light filters through the curtains, Sherlock sleeps. Victor’s hand has fallen warm and open against his face.

 


	5. Not Ungood

He wakes up. A simple thing, really. He sleeps sometimes, therefore it stands to reason that he wakes. 

He never wakes like this. A presence, and a sudden blankness; the lift of the mattress as another body departs.  He doesn’t mean to, but he makes a sound. A faint intake of breath.

“It’s all right,” Victor says. “Go back to sleep.” 

He says—Victor says. 

How strange. 

Sherlock sleeps again. 

Later,  in a panic, he wakes. He’s too warm. That’s not new. He sleeps in his clothes, sometimes. More often than he should. He’s in his clothes (not socks, at least), and he’s also wrapped in a blanket. It’s constricting. There’s a weight on his leg. There is also, now that he allows himself to feel it, the overwhelming sensation of wrongness. _This is not his bed._

It is, however, decidedly _a_ bed. He hasn’t opened his eyes, approaching, as he is, something like slow terror. The pillow is soft—softer than his—and it smells like stale cigarette smoke (normal, _hi_ s). He likes to keep up standards and shower before bed, but clearly he hasn’t this time. There is also a scent of lemon. Not his.

Sherlock can’t pretend that he doesn’t know that scent.

He needs to evaluate this. He must, in fact, open his eyes. But he can’t. Oh god, no, he can’t. Because there it is: the why of it all.

There it is, indeed: something that feels a bit like shame. His delirious ramblings. The inexcusable loss of rationality. He wandered through the dark like a madman, and now he’s in someone else’s bed. 

This is Victor’s bed, and he’s in it. He’s never actually considered the practicalities of waking up in someone else’s bed. Not after the distant early years when he slept across the foot of Mycroft’s bed like—yes, like the dog that’s with him now. 

It would be, quite possibly, the worst thing in the world if Victor were still in it. Mercifully, he is not.

Sherlock does open his eyes, and it’s too bright, too soon. Gladys is reclining against his leg, solid and pale and placidly dog. Victor isn’t in the room at all. He can’t be too far away, really; not without her. Although, sometimes, Sherlock does wonder how far he manages to get without the dog. Victor has a mind like a cartographer’s. Sherlock wants to know precisely how much he has mapped. 

And Sherlock, who is learning to store things correctly, where does he catalogue _this?_   He shouldn’t forget it. He stepped over the edge (Sebastian, the snakes) and Victor...Victor didn’t seem all that bothered. What does that mean? 

The door opens. 

“Are you still here?” Victor asks. He is damp and clean and dressed in wool. 

Like stone grinding on stone, Sherlock says “I’m here.” 

And it’s fine.  

* * *

Mycroft comes for him in a white Vauxhall Astra five-door, so painfully on time that Sherlock wonders if he’d arrived early and then circled; streets ticked off to the minute.

“You’re looking unwell. Aren’t you sleeping?” he asks, as Sherlock throws his overstuffed canvas bag into the seat behind him. 

“Exams. I’ll make it up.” 

Mycroft peers at him, critically. “And you’re not eating. Again.” 

Sherlock slides into the passenger seat and does up the safety belt. He wonders whether he’s the first person to have used it in months, or indeed, ever. It seems likely, although Mycroft is the type to keep his car scrupulously clean. “Thank you, _Mummy._ Your concern has been duly noted.” 

“Don’t be unamusing, Sherlock.” Mycroft pulls out onto the road, forehead pleated slightly with concentration. Or something else. 

“You've had the foot surgery, then.” Sherlock can’t resist; they’ve been doing this for years. 

His brother nods. “Over a month ago.” After a certain distance, he adds _“You_ didn’t sleep in your own bed last night.” He may be a proper adult now, but he’s not above playing the game. He’s good at it. They both are.

“True. But how did you know?” Sherlock opens the glove box. Tidy. Boring. He shuts it again with a snap.

“I’ve known you for years. It’s obvious.”

“Go on then...?”

“Your hair, for one thing. Incidentally, it’s getting far too long. You should see a barber. I’ll take you to mine.”

“Only if he doesn’t make me look like you.” The elder Holmes hasn’t suffered a stray hair since 1989. It’s nearly geometric in its precision, which is an impressive feat, considering its tendency to curl. Clearly this is compensation for the colour, which has always irked him by being steadfastly auburn. “What else, then?” 

“You slept in your clothes,” Mycroft continues, running his fingers musingly over the wheel. 

“True. So?”

“Not, I think, a lover, although you shared a bed with someone.” 

Sherlock snorts. 

“It _could_ happen,” Mycroft says blandly. “Humans have been known to do that sort of thing.” 

“That leaves us out, then.” 

“Mmm.”  Mycroft’s eyes crease, very faintly, in amusement at the idea. “Someone with a dog?” he continues, smoothly.

“Yes. Her name is Gladys.” Sherlock looks down at his own legs. Black denim, not terribly fresh. Three coarse white hairs on his right shin. Ah. Nice. 

“The dog, not the person, clearly. A dog in student lodgings? That’s surprising.” 

“Not really. He’s blind.” 

“Ah.” Mycroft flips the turn indicator, a bit earlier than strictly necessary. 

“His name is Victor,” Sherlock offers. He eyes the ashtray, which has been used recently. A small chink in the armour of cleanliness, and an explanation for Mycroft’s razor-sharp build.

“Your friend.” It’s not a question, although probability suggests it should be.

“What? Surprised I have a friend?” 

“No. I’m glad.” Mycroft smiles. A small smile, but it’s genuine. He reaches into his crisp, grey suit pocket and pulls out two cigarettes. “Have one of mine,” he says. “I saw you looking.”

* * *

Mycroft’s flat is small, tidy, and irreproachably dull. He does have a computer. Sherlock will gladly exchange nights on a sofa for that. And of course, there’s the city. Even with the door closed and the curtains drawn, he can feel it just outside. Waiting.

Mycroft puts the fragrant remains of their Italianate dinner in the small, very nearly empty refrigerator, and washes his hands. “Well,” he says. “Do what you like. I’ve got to go out for a bit.” 

“Work?”

“In a way.” He hands his brother a pristine brass key. “You’ll remember the Tube system, I’m sure.” 

“Yes.” Sherlock flips the key in and over his fingers, torn between freedom and hesitation.

“Oh. Money?” 

“Sorry. I’m a bit short.” 

Mycroft pulls out his wallet, leather and slimly discreet, as befits his adult image. “Twenty pounds,” he says. “For now. And we should talk about that.” 

Sherlock rolls his eyes, but accepts the banknote. “If we must.” 

His brother sighs. “I am going to see her later this week.” He doesn’t need to clarify who _she_ is. “You should—”

“Leave you to it?” Sherlock nods, sharply, disgusted by the speed at which the words rip out of his own mouth. “I know. God, how I know.”

“I’m sorry,” Mycroft says. “You’re right, of course.” He sighs again. “And it’s still nothing to do with you. I hope you know that.”

Sherlock peels off his jacket, dislodging a pencil as he folds it savagely over the back of Mycroft’s sofa. “No. It’s everything to do with me.” 

“It isn’t.” Mycroft pushes his hands deep into his pockets, spoiling the line of his suit. “But I am...sorry.” 

“Don’t be.” Sherlock reaches for the pencil and tucks it back inside his jacket. “I don’t expect or want your sympathy.”

“I know.” Mycroft’s mouth tilts down at one side, making his nose look longer than ever. “It isn’t forever,” he says. He goes.

* * *

Mycroft’s bathroom is icy white and devoid of personality. Sherlock pokes through his cupboard anyway. It stands to reason he hadn't finished his prescription after the surgery that removed his accessory navicular bone. If there are awards to be handed out for the stiff upper lip, Mycroft will be first in line. Interesting, though, that he kept the bottle. Sherlock has no tendency towards opiates, so he leaves it be. 

He studies his face in the mirror. Not much point in shaving, really, but he does it anyway. Stubble, light though it is, makes him feel dirty. And yes, his hair is a bit too long. Wild and uneven, as it hasn’t been since childhood. It’s apparently all the rage to have straight, floppy hair right now, but his own tends upwards at the best of times. There’s simply too much of it; dark and curling. 

 _And what must that have been like,_ he wonders, thinking of Victor’s hand on his head. What, indeed. Odd to think about it, but no one touches him, ever, so he does think about it, for a moment. Wonders what any of it feels like. Looks at his own face, all strange sharp angles and hollows. His mouth is a mistake. It’s hers. Soft and betraying.

And he will not think, _not think,_ about her. Sitting in judgement, somewhere.  Lying in state, if it comes to that. And it does. It suits her, all of that undivided attention.

_Bury it._

He scrubs at his teeth, runs his tongue over the sharp points, and spits. He should make a better effort, really. They’ve a genetic disposition towards the weak when it comes to teeth. Or so he's been told; Sherlock lost faith in the dentist when she wouldn’t let him keep his own extracted wisdom teeth, early and impacted as they were. A souvenir could have been interesting. It certainly would have overwritten the humiliation of being off his head with the anaesthetic. Sixteen and raving like an idiot. Mycroft came to collect him, and he was gratifyingly silent about it all. 

Sherlock strips off and turns on the shower. Waits for it to run hot, because it’s freezing in the flat. Well. It’s winter, and Mycroft has taken to wearing suits. He was born to wear suits. Mercifully, his businesslike austerity still allows for decent soap. 

Decent soap that smells of lemon. Sherlock steps into the shower, and there it is: clean and cold and very Victor.

It is odd, so odd, to have anyone be so _prevalent._ He’s used to catching the connections in things. It is so terribly strange to find himself thinking of another person, repeatedly, specifically him, in every possible context.  Is this what it means, having a friend? No wonder he hasn’t, before. It’s nearly unbearable. To soap himself clean with lemon and think, I _am becoming a bit more like you. Clean, in the same way that you are clean._

He scrubs through his hair with mint and rosemary. Someday, he’ll file Shakespeare far away, but just now, it is still for remembrance. And it’s pleasant, actually. He can live with that. Sharp and clear and green. Unexpected, yet not entirely out of character for Mycroft. 

Sherlock gets out, towels himself dry (lush towels—lovely), and puts on fresh clothes. Looks out the window. Thinks about getting on the Circle Line. 

He goes to the computer, instead. He telnets in and writes:

_I am in London._

And after a moment’s thought, he adds, _I could be your eyes. If you’ll let me._

Hours later, there’s a return message. 

_Yes, please._

_Tell me everything._

  _Oh, and make it poetry. This robotic voice wants testing._

 


	6. Nothing In Particular

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary references and translations are in the end notes.

“Do you also forget to blink when you forget to breathe?” Victor’s voice is sudden and soft, his breath warm against Sherlock’s ear. 

He jumps, a little, startled by this unexpected proximity. “What?” He turns his head and looks up. “Oh.”

“You have been wool-gathering for the better part of two hours. I became concerned that you had died,” Victor says, in a lazily reproachful tone. He is stretched out on his bed with an open book beside him. “I can only hope it was worthwhile.”

Sherlock had been seated on the floor below him, propped against the side of the metal bed frame and looking at nothing, fingers pressed against his mouth. He stretches, decompressing his spine and restoring circulation to his Gladys-bound legs. 

Woolgathering, indeed. What a ridiculous term. “Electric sheep,” he says experimentally, because he really hadn’t been thinking at all, for once. “Only charged particles and a stiff neck.”

Victor laughs, and presses a finger against the top of Sherlock’s head. “You are not an android. I’d know.”

“What if I’m just convincingly lifelike?” 

“Those ones were, though. Hence the ethical nightmare. I’m surprised you remember. I thought you despised that book.” Victor runs his fingers down and kneads the stiffness at the base of Sherlock’s skull. He makes this seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, although perhaps it is not.

 _“Rectus capitis,”_ Sherlock says, because he knows that his friend likes to know where things are and what they are called. And then,  _“Trapezius,”_ as relentless thumbs iron the knots out of his muscles, bringing him pain and joy in equal measure.

“God, you make Latin sound so much better than my tutors do,” Victor says. “Even if it is anatomical. I should make you read me the _Aeneid.”_

“What, all of it?” Sherlock snorts. 

“Why not? Or were you planning on doing something else today? I know you’ve got a punishing social schedule, but entertaining me should always take first priority. It’s simultaneously educational and improving.”

“Reading to the blind? Don’t make me out to be some sort of virtuous youth.”

“Hmm. Virtuous youth. Stalwart pillar of England. That’s you.”  Victor does something with his hands that makes the muscle fibres roll squeakily over Sherlock’s scapulae, despite two intervening layers of cloth.

Sherlock makes a sound then, one without dignity. “A pillar? Now I sound like Nelson’s Column,” he complains, pressing backwards into Victor’s hands to demonstrate that he’s still willing.

The fingers hesitate, and then slide under his jacket collar, but still safely over his shirt. “Yes. You are almost _exactly_ like Nelson’s Column. We’ll get you your very own pigeons. You can wear them on your head.”

“Pigeons are vile.”

“You should know.  _You’re_ the one who wrote me multiple stanzas describing Nelson’s pigeons in relentless, filthy detail. Their diseased and mutilated feet were particularly memorable. You should have heard the computerised lady-voice stumbling over that.” 

“That was a work of brilliance. It takes a proper genius to find a rhyme for staphylococcus.” 

“And yet I can think of at least two you didn’t try.” Victor extricates his hands, gives Sherlock’s shoulders a final squeeze and a thump, then rolls away. 

 _“Raucous_ was too obvious.”

“You, of course, are never obvious.”

“Certainly not.” Sherlock sighs and rotates his head experimentally. Functional. Loose. Lovely. “No one has ever done that to my neck before,” he says. 

“Really? That’s sad. If the experience proves corrupting, you must let me know.” Victor yawns. “Why am I so tired?”

“It’s much too warm in here.”

“So you say. You’re overdressed.”

“Subjective data.” Sherlock shrugs out of his jacket and tosses it over Victor’s face. “There.”

“Ugh,” he says, but makes no immediate effort to remove it. “Dear god, but you smoke too much,” he adds, muffled beneath the shabby grey fabric. “This reeks.”

“Smoking helps me think.”

“So you say.” Victor flings the offending garment over the side of the bed, missing Sherlock by a matter of mere centimetres and earning a reproachful whine from Gladys. “I have a better theory. I think you simply enjoy breathing fire.”

“So now I’m a dragon? Make up your mind.”

“Oh, I have.”

“And?”

Victor smiles enigmatically up at the ceiling. “Not a dragon,” he muses, folding his arms back behind his head. “No. If anything, you’re a basilisk.”

“Why a basilisk?”

“It’s obvious. You’ve got a poisoned tongue, no great love for heroes, and I suspect you’re the sort who can kill with a look. Happily, I enjoy complete immunity from your deadly gaze.”

Sherlock wonders if Victor guesses how much time he devotes to staring at him. It feels like a minor act of theft; simultaneously thrilling and frivolous. Despite this, he studies his friend’s profile once again, the flaxen hair curling artlessly over his brow, his long straight nose, his decisive chin, the finely sculpted curve of his lips. 

He wonders, then, quite abruptly, what it would be like to kiss Victor Trevor. Would it be awful, or would it be, like so many otherwise mundane experiences they’ve shared, somehow exceptional? 

“You’re glaring at me now, aren’t you?” Victor smiles a faint, indolent smile. “I know you are. And look! I’m still very much alive.” 

God, it would be so easy. Victor already occupies his personal bubble to an unprecedented extent. But Victor’s the one who does all the touching; it’s really just another form of sight to him. This would not be the same. It would be a massive step beyond staring. It would be—Sherlock halts this line of inquiry before it can go any further.

_Cigarette. Outside. Now._

He rises to his feet, a bit too quickly, and stoops to retrieve his jacket. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he says. “Your fault for reminding me I’ve got things to burn.”

“Not too many,” Victor calls through the closing door. “You owe me Vergil.”

* * *

When he returns to his own halls later that evening, there’s a note in his pigeon hole.

It takes him a moment to decipher the scratched blue handwriting. It doesn’t belong to anyone he knows. Male, over twenty-five. Right-handed. Hasty.

The Urgent box is ticked, but whoever it was hadn’t bothered to fill in the time.

**From: Mycroft Holmes**

**To: Sherlock Holmes**

**Message: I will be here Friday morning at nine.**

Sherlock carefully folds the thin pink message slip into quarters and tucks it into his breast pocket. All the things that have been running through his mind—the alkylation of hydrazine, the ominous feel of the words _agnosco veteris vestigia flammae,_ the suspicion he ought to stop smoking after all—all of these things fall away, as if sucked into the black vacuum of space. 

He stares blankly into the ranks of wooden pigeon holes, eyes scanning but not really noting the contents of each one. 

She’s dead.

No need to veil the thought in kindly euphemism; never for himself, and certainly not in this. She is dead. Has died. Is gone.

He blinks _(Do you also forget to blink when you forget to breathe?)_ and presses his hand over the paper through the cloth of his jacket. It crackles. 

“Something wrong?” He slowly turns and looks, eyes skating over the moon face and hand-knit bobble hat of a dark-eyed girl whose name he can’t remember. She’s in one of his labs. What lab? A lab.

“Sherlock?” she says, sounding oddly concerned. Her hat is a horrid, almost algal sort of green. He remembers now that he sometimes smiles at her, largely because doing so leads to additional hours at his favourite work station. Her name is Jennifer.

“My mother is dead,” he answers, making his voice sound politely conversational. 

* * *

There’s a knock on his door at precisely nine the next morning. When he doesn’t answer, he hears the knob turn softly, followed by the creak of the hinge as Mycroft enters the room. Sherlock is looking out the window, watching the beads of cold, late February rain slide down the glass in broken lines. He doesn’t turn his head.

“The burial is tomorrow,” his brother says, after a long silence. 

Sherlock clears his throat. “Ah.” 

“I’d appreciate it if you came with me.”

He turns then, and looks at his older brother. Mycroft’s hair is dark with rain, water dripping unheeded over his face. His customary pallor might be a bit more pronounced today, or perhaps it’s the strangely unflattering blue shade of his tie.

“Will it make any difference if I do?” 

“It will to me.” 

Sherlock looks at his room, at his stacks of books and assorted oddities, the charts on the walls, the teacup heaped with ash and filters, and his neatly made up bed. 

“Fine,” he says. He doesn’t bother to pack a bag.

* * *

It’s a small and sombre service, surprisingly lacking in pomp considering who it is for ( _the living,_ Mycroft would say, but they both know better). Sherlock turns up the collar of his borrowed coat (too big) and watches them lower her sleek wooden coffin into the ground. He thinks, as he always does, that he would prefer to be burned when the time comes. 

There’s a priest, which makes no sense when no one here, least of all the woman in the box, believes in God. He wonders if that was something she’d requested: a final plea for clemency. Mumbled hymns and bet hedging.

No. It would never occur to her that she _might_ require forgiveness. The ceremony is a polite fiction. Or, no.This is starkly dramatic, parsimonious: a martyrdom. Of course. That’s exactly what it is.

Mycroft stands at his shoulder, sheltering them both from the rain beneath a massive black umbrella, but they manage not to touch. “All lives end,” he says softly. “Even hers.” His complete lack of affect suggests he might as well be remarking upon the cost of the coffin, but Sherlock finds it strangely comforting. It’s an incantation.

As Mycroft tips a restrained handful of soil onto the coffin, his brother contemplates the violence of the dark rectangular cavity carved into the green grass of the hillside, and does not speak. He feels nothing. 

Later, in the car, Mycroft doesn’t start the engine, but stares unseeing into the windscreen. “She was wrong about you,” he says. “I am convinced of that.”

“What if she wasn’t?” Sherlock hasn’t spoken a word since he dressed that morning, and his voice sounds too loud in such an enclosed space.

“I’d know.”

“What does it mean, then, that I feel nothing whatsoever about her death? Is that proper? Is it human?” 

“I think it’s inevitable,” Mycroft says. He slots the key into the ignition and turns, but lets the engine sleep. 

“When I was five,” Sherlock begins, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. 

“You were a child.”

“Not that it did me any good.”

“I envied you, at the time. Your unrestrained grief.” Mycroft pulls a packet of cigarettes out of the glove box and leaves it opened like a book upon the dash. He puts one in his mouth, applies the end to the glowing hot coil of the lighter. “I am not unaware of the irony,” he says, handing it to his brother and taking out a second for himself, “but there it is.”

They listen to the rain pounding on the roof, with the windows cracked to let the smoke out. “You read me _Le Petit Prince_ ,” Sherlock says at last, crushing his spent filter into the ashtray. “I could have read it for myself.”

“Yes. She read it to me, years before.”

“Notre grand-mère?”

“Oui.”

He starts the car in earnest, now. “Tu étais le meilleur renard,” Sherlock says, over the roar and the rain. 

“I’m pleased to see you’ve kept up with your French.” 

Mycroft drives on in silence for twenty minutes, and while they are waiting for traffic to pass them at a crossroads, he speaks again. 

“There is nothing wrong with wanting to be loved.”

* * *

Sherlock lies on the sofa in the tiny London flat, still dressed in the stiff black suit his brother bought him, and feels nothing.

That isn’t precisely true. Somewhere, in the back of his mind—and really, that’s no good; minds do not have backs, not even his—there’s a hole where feeling should be. Nothingness with an edge on it. What does that mean?

Mycroft had made him sit down and eat buttered toast in his clinical kitchen, and then he poured him a glass of whisky. _Drink it,_ he said, watching Sherlock trail his fingers through the water sweated off the glass. _It isn’t much._

_I don’t drink._

_It’s a pointless ritual, I know, but surprisingly effective when you have nothing to say._

_It wasn’t then._

_You were fifteen. You were angry. Are you angry now?_

_I’m—_ He tried it, and it was like an old wooden sea chest with a hint of battery acid. Or so he imagined. He thought there was something to do with oak and possibly peat bogs in the making of it. This wasn’t something he’d ever cared to know, although the structure of ethanol, in general, is not a mystery. He took another sip. 

 _I am, if anything, regretful,_ Mycroft said. 

 _And relieved,_ Sherlock suggested, because he could see that, suddenly: something in the lines of his brother’s face. He’d been shouldering their mother alone for three years, sometimes distant, but not always. It was what she had wanted.

 _Yes. And that, of course._ He sighed and ran his fingers over the handle of his umbrella, which lay between them on the table like a sword. _I have to go to Sussex tomorrow_ , he said. _You can come with me, or you can remain here._

_I should go back._

_You will. They’ve given you a few days’ grace,_ he said. _I’ve arranged it._

_Oh._

_She’s given me the estate. With certain limitations, of course. You’re to receive a trust. More when you finish university._

_And the house?_

_The house is mine,_ Mycroft said. _If there’s something you want, you must tell me._

 _I don’t want anything,_ Sherlock said.

_I know._

Sherlock doesn’t drink, so the whisky made him feel strange and fuzzy around the edges. But it was warm; it made the void more tolerable, somehow. He asked for another, and Mycroft gave it to him. _I want to stay here,_ he said.

* * *

When he wakes in the morning, there is a note with a telephone number wrapped around fifty pounds on the table beside the sofa. He doesn’t get up.

He thinks of Mycroft meeting with a solicitor in their family home. The tables would be covered with dust—or maybe they’re not; he doesn’t know. 

He thinks about the rooms in that house. The complex he has been building in his head does not resemble them, but they’re there in his mind, ranked perhaps by purpose, or by the ages he remembers. It’s all there, pieces locked away room by room, because he had apparently known about the Method of Loci all along; he just didn’t have a name for what it was.

Seven: they’re home from school and Mycroft is playing the piano. Rather well; he's already attempting difficult pieces with good results. This one is Chopin. Sherlock likes music. He doesn’t play anything, and he’s not allowed to touch the grand.

Eight: in his own room, standing over the carefully composed remains of the cat, scalpel slipping in his hands. _I only wanted to know why,_ he says, looking up at her set white face, her perpetually wounded eyes. _It was already dead. I didn’t. I wouldn’t._ And then finally, in desperation: _No one told me it was wrong._

Five: weeping uncontrollably because his grandmother (who loved him) was dead. He rocks on the coarse oriental carpet in the sitting room, his face damp, his eyes burning. _This is excessive,_ she says. _You have to stop,_ and her hand cracks down hard across his shoulders, but he can’t stop, can’t breathe, so she does it again, and he sobs and he shakes and he still cannot stop.

Five again: lying across the foot of Mycroft’s four poster bed, flannel-covered knees drawn up against his chest, fingers pressed deep inside his own mouth, staring out into the darkness as he listens to the voices downstairs, as they both do. _He’s too young to understand,_ and _No, he understands perfectly well._

Six: small and sullen in the dining room, because it isn’t fair that his arm is aching and encased in heavy plaster. _They wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t provoked them. I have spoken to your teacher, Sherlock._

Five yet again: his father’s hand on his head, large and warm, smelling pleasantly of graphite. _Intellectual and emotional maturity don’t always come together,_ he says to her. _You can’t expect both boys to be the same. If anything, Mycroft worries me more._

Twelve: _Your father is not coming home._

Six again: a boat on the pond, which isn’t a room, but it ought to be. _Once we’ve submerged it,_ Mycroft says, _we will mark it with a buoy so you can find it again._ They raise the black flag and drink lemonade.

Four: _I’m very proud of you,_ she says, gently taking the book from his hands. _You are exceptional._ He feels the cool and fleeting touch of her lips on his cheek for the rest of the day. 

Fifteen: _Just go,_ she says, silhouetted stark and black against the windows in the conservatory. _You disgust me._

Nineteen: Nothing. A splitting headache accompanied by tessellated lights.

* * *

Sherlock gets up, and that’s awful, blood rushing out of his head and bringing more pain in its wake. He finds himself looking in the medicine cupboard. There is paracetamol and aspirin. There is an amber bottle of pills with Mycroft’s name on it. Mycroft is allergic to codeine; it’s possible they both are, but Sherlock has not had occasion to test this in himself. The pills should, perhaps, be Dervocet, but they are not. They’re morphine.

Probably—yes, certainly— overkill for a migraine. But he’s alone. He might as well. Morphine was almost certainly what they gave her, in the end. He does not want and cannot feel sympathy, but there might be some level of justice in it if he does this.

Sherlock takes a tablet, running water into his cupped hands from the tap. He glances at himself as he does so, straight and pale in the unaccustomed black suit. It is, he thinks, a bit like armour. It says nothing about him. He likes that, although the disturbances in his visual field render his own face unfathomable. He is allowed an impression of darkness, of light, of possible precision. He both does and does not resemble her at all.

He returns to the sofa, and over time, the pain recedes. It’s still there, but it’s as if it belongs to someone else. He’d always thought that morphine would come down like a blanket, warm and obliterating, forcing sleep. What it is, if anything, is dissociative. He could, he supposes, take another, but he’s aware that his tendency towards experimentation, coupled with impatience, could be dangerous. Better, perhaps, not to start down that road.

An hour later, he rises, stumbling, and does take another, appalled by the lassitude and vertigo that he feels. It would be better to knock himself down altogether. 

It does. 

He dreams. He’s in the Sussex house, at the heavy oak dining room table, and Victor is seated beside him. There’s a storm outside, and Victor says _On a dark day, I can see forever._ Sherlock looks at him, and he looks back, irises pale and pupils black. _You don’t think I see you, but I do._ He laughs.

 _Your eyes do, but you do not,_ Sherlock protests.

Victor says nothing, but returns his gaze. Looks at him, in a way he never does. He sees.

 _L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,_ the fox says. He’s perched at the head of the table, in the seat that Father used to take, black paws folded over linen.

 _None of it means anything,_ Sherlock says. _I can look, and that means nothing._

 _No,_ Victor says _. I see you. You should close your eyes._

He does. 

 _Benzene,_ Victor says, in the dark. _Why that?_

 _Because it is perfect._   _Because it is closed._

Victor slides his hand beneath Sherlock’s shirt. _Subjective data,_ he says, and his fingers are warm against his flesh.

 _There are only twenty-four hours in a day,_ Sherlock thinks. _If I open my eyes, they’ll be gone._ He blinks, and they go. 

No time, so there’s nothing left...

He sleeps.

* * *

 When he wakes, it is because the telephone is ringing. Judging by the light, it is afternoon. 

The answer phone kicks in when he doesn’t lift the receiver. 

“Sherlock,” it says in Victor’s voice. “It’s me.”

He picks up, but does not speak.

“If you’re there,” Victor says, hearing the change in tone on the line. “If you are...”

“Yes,” Sherlock says at last. 

“Good.”

“How did you find me?” 

“That’s a funny story,” Victor says. “I confess, I was concerned when you didn’t come round the next day. So I thought I’d track you down. It took me ages. I should have a word with the disabilities group about your residence.”

Sherlock says nothing.

“You weren’t there, of course. And the people who live there...well. Some of them are terribly rude. I tried my luck in the chemistry lab. That was appalling; they didn’t get on with Gladys at all. But I did meet a girl called Jennifer.”

Sherlock sighs, audibly enough, because Victor goes on.

“She told me your mother had died. Naturally, I went on to the Registrar. There, I was terribly charming—I can be, you know—and despite the fact that it goes against every protocol, they gave me your brother’s mobile number. For some reason, people are terribly anxious not to upset me.”

Sherlock laughs. It slips out.

“He is in Sussex, apparently, but he said you might answer if I rang. He was completely terrifying, so for the love of god, please don’t tell me I’ve wasted my time.”

“You haven’t,” he says. 

“Good.”

There is silence, for a very long time. 

“Is it something you’d like to talk about?” Victor asks.

“Not particularly.”

“Thank goodness. I have absolutely no idea what to say.”

“It’s fine. I didn’t—I haven’t seen her for years.”

“Ah.”

“I’m coming back tomorrow,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t know how to proceed, so he doesn’t. 

* * *

He takes another tablet, because language has failed him. He takes a second one immediately afterwards, because he’s been thinking too much about the dream. He takes a third because he has no idea how to return to the place where he was, before he sat in Victor’s room and wondered what it would be like to do something terrible. 

He still has the presence of mind to put the bottle on the table beside the sofa, because if he’s miscalculated, it would be best to make sure someone knows the magnitude of his mistake.  

* * *

When he wakes, it’s because Mycroft’s cool hands are on his face, and his throat burns. His mouth is awash in acid. 

“Never do that again,” his brother says. Sherlock turns and vomits into the porcelain bowl placed beside his head.

Later, when he’s clean and warm and cocooned in the blankets on Mycroft’s bed, his brother gets in beside him. “I shouldn’t have left you,” he says. “I’ve brought you something.” 

Sherlock shuts his eyes, and listens to the tale of a lonely prince who tended a vain rose on an asteroid.

In the morning, he’ll find the violin. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some of the things that might need explanation/translation:
> 
> From Vergil's Aeneid: agnosco veteris vestigia flammae can be translated as "I recognise the vestiges of an old flame." 
> 
> French:
> 
> “Notre grand-mère?” [our grandmother?]
> 
> “Oui.” [yes]
> 
> “Tu étais le meilleur renard" [You were the best fox]
> 
> "L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux." [“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” - Le Petit Prince]


	7. Looking

Sherlock returns to university two days later than they’d intended, and it feels as if a year has passed without him. He sits in an oaken office and nods through questions and provisions, his eyes lost amongst the figures woven into the carpet. Mycroft speaks for him, twisting his umbrella in his hands to emphasise his words. On some level, Sherlock is aware it isn’t raining, which ought to make that interesting.

He goes to his room and deposits the heavy black violin case on his bed. Mycroft was insistent, but Sherlock can’t see the point. He has never played an instrument in his life, not after his aborted and illicit attempt at the piano. It is entirely possible that Sherlock is incapable of producing anything harmonious with his hands. 

He takes the teacup full of ashes and stained filters off his desk and drops it into the metal waste paper basket, flinching at the sound as it shatters. After a moment’s contemplation, he puts the basket out in the hall and props open a window. He has not smoked since the morphine. Now the reek of cigarettes repels him. 

Sherlock sits numbly through lectures, pressing his fingers together to provide a focal point against the assailing features of everything around him. He does not respond to the questions, the polite or malicious eyes assessing him for damage. In the lab, he peers into a microscope and cannot make it past the floaters to see the specimen. He slams his hand against the cool metal table in frustration, making everything jump around the edges. No one speaks. 

Eventually he eats, but sparingly, poking at the meat on his plate and at last abandoning it when he recognises too many vascular structures in the desiccated brown flesh. He drinks water, and that at least is clean and cold. He feels, again, the eyes of other people, running over him like inquisitive little knives. He closes his.

He goes to his room again, and pushes the violin case against the wall, making room for the length of his legs. After an hour, he bends down and opens the case, inhaling spruce and dust and rosin. He stares at the instrument’s scarred surface, its gleaming oil varnish worn away where many hands have pressed against it. 

He looks at the horsehair of the bow, loose and white and fibrous like the human spinal cord he once saw in a pathology lab bucket. The windings are tarnished silver, the eye is mother of pearl. He leaves it suspended in its place.

Once he dares to lift the instrument free, it is surprisingly light in his hands. He tilts its body and stares at the chatoyant bands of maple striping its softly curved back and its neck. He rests it on his thigh and plucks a string with hesitant fingers. It is, he realises, the D string, or should be, but it’s flat. It has not been played for years. He touches the other strings, also discordant, and the slightly tilted bridge, which memory tells him ought to stand straighter than it is. He peers down into the f-holes, cut into the wood like an integral and its reflection, and sees the pale white post that grounds the treble side. 

 _You need something new,_ Mycroft told him, but it isn’t new. The instrument is, as the yellowed label deep inside suggests, a Stradivarius copy made in a German workshop two hundred years ago. It was his father’s.

Daring nothing further now, he gently returns it to its nest inside the case. Maybe tomorrow he’ll be able to risk turning the ebony pegs. Maybe he’ll remember his father’s fingers pressing sound out of the fingerboard well enough to follow.

He removes his shoes and places them neatly under the bed, side by side. They’re the stiff oxford brogues that Mycroft bought him for the funeral, and they are not yet properly worn in. He has blisters where the inner seams pressed into his toes. He reclines once again on the bed, and stares at the shadows generated by the lamp on his desk. They do not move.

After a time, he becomes aware that someone is knocking on his door. He waits, but the person outside is persistent. He can’t think why it should matter, but he gets up and opens the door so it will stop.

He is not prepared to see Victor standing on the other side, saying “You’re late.” There hadn’t been room to consider him in all the blankness, but here he is. 

“Late for what?” Sherlock asks. 

“Nearly everything,” Victor says cryptically. “Is this convenient? If you say it isn’t, I fully intend to ignore that.”

“No. But you might as well come in.” He is finding it impossible to interpret his friend's face; the expression that isn’t there.

“Where’s your desk?” Victor asks. “Left or right of here?”

“Where’s your _dog?”_   Gladys is nowhere to be seen.

“I left her sleeping. She needed the rest.”

Sherlock wonders, with a sickening internal twist, whether he has been terribly wrong about something.

“If you want to know how I got here, I had some help. From a human,” Victor says in clipped tones. “Left or right?”

Sherlock says “Left,” and steps aside. He watches as Victor takes a few exploratory steps and finally brushes against the back of the chair.

“It’s a bit strange,” he remarks, as he settles down into the seat, “that I don’t know your room at all. It seems to me that I should. But you do tend to make a regular appearance at mine, so it hasn’t mattered as much as perhaps it ought to.”

Sherlock can’t think of anything to say. He hadn’t thought it was important to anyone but himself. His space is his own, so deeply private that it’s like being inside his own head when he’s there. Victor’s room is something else altogether. He wonders, yet again, if he has stolen something that he shouldn’t have.

Victor tilts his head now, listening, and Sherlock holds his breath. He’s not sure why he does it, but he does.

“Ah, see, that doesn’t work at all,” Victor says at last. “You generally talk a great deal; sometimes to an astonishing degree, but when you’re silent, I still hear you. Or should do, but where are you now?”

 _By the door_ , he thinks. He swallows.

Audibly, it seems, because then Victor says, “If you aren’t going to speak to me, come over here.” He waits, eyebrows lifted expectantly.

Sherlock’s feet are no more responsive than his mouth is. 

Victor looks at nothing; nothing which, coincidentally, happens to include the spot where Sherlock stands. “Please,” he says. "You know this isn’t any good to me. It pains me to state the obvious, but I _cannot fucking see your face."_

Victor doesn’t swear, not like this. Because Sherlock does see, he notes that the other man’s mouth is pressed thin, the edges turning downwards. He feels his own jaw clench, as if in sympathy. He is not sympathetic. He swallows again. 

“Please,” Victor repeats. “It matters.” 

“What does?” 

“Aha.” Victor smiles, a strange little half-smile. “You see, I _am_ well acquainted with your tragic flaw, Sherlock Holmes. You always want to know what happens next.”

“What does happen next?” Sherlock asks, with an edge of irritation. 

“Well. I could be wrong, but I believe our hero swallows his pride and seats himself beside his friend. Possibly they have a conversation. The subject is not important.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. The point is proximity, and through that, companionship. I would suggest basic courtesy, but I believe that ship has sailed.” 

“That,” Sherlock says, “is a terribly hackneyed phrase.”

Victor grins, wolfishly. “Ah, but it’s drawn you out of your tent, hasn’t it?"

“Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”  Sherlock walks over to his desk and sits down on the surface. There was an advantage, then, to clearing things away.

“Well. Sometimes you don’t make much sense either,” Victor says. “Sorry. Was that your only chair?” He stops. “Oh. You haven’t smoked today." 

“No. I’ve stopped.” 

“It was an observation, not a moral judgement. I was just thinking something was odd about your scent. No smoke. New clothes. Not your usual soap.”

“My brother hopes to civilise me,” Sherlock says. He should not be surprised by Victor’s observations. That would be base hypocrisy.

“Not too much, I hope.” 

“Does that seem likely?”

“No,” Victor says, but with a hint of approval.

Sherlock catches himself assessing Victor’s eyes. His pupils are dilated in the semi-darkness of the room, but there’s no mistaking their lack of focus. “I dreamed you could see me,” he says. 

He is surprised when Victor replies, “Sometimes I dream that myself.” 

“How does that work?”

“Inaccurately, I suspect. Obviously, I can’t know what you look like. Certainly not the colours. As for the rest, I’ve only...well. I suppose I’ve only touched your face twice. I know you’re tall and wiry. I know your hair curls, but not quite like mine.” He frowns.

“Do you remember colours?” Sherlock asks. 

“I was ten when it happened. That is old enough to have given me a framework, but they say that visual memories fade more quickly than things like scents. They become distorted. When I visualise grass, for example, it may not be properly green.”

“No. Perhaps not.” Sherlock says this, knowing that _proper green_ does not exist. It is merely a segment on a spectrum. Variations in the human eye and brain render unique interpretations of the same data. They defy comparison or description. People speak of seeing things in the same light, but in fact, it isn’t possible.

His friend interrupts this train of thought. “You could tell me, you know. What you look like.”

“Dark hair,” Sherlock says. “Less so when I was younger. My eyes are a bit harder to define.  Lighter than yours.” 

“Ah.” Victor looks perplexed. “You’re being vague.” 

It isn’t right, this thing he’s stolen. The endless looking without possible return. Sherlock gets off the desk and kneels on the floor beside the chair. It’s a position that makes him think of executions, which might, in fact, be apt. “Give me your hands, and I’ll show you,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

Victor parts his lips as if to say something, but then he doesn’t. He holds out his hands to Sherlock, who guides them to rest against his own face. “I don’t mind,” he repeats, when the fingers stop, unmoving, at his temples. 

“Sorry.” Victor swallows. “That’s just. It’s a bit strange.” 

“Yes,” Sherlock says. Victor’s hands are clean (lemons) and slightly cool against his skin. _Breathe,_ he reminds himself, because it’s the sort of thing that people do.

“You’re very tense. If it’s not—” Victor suspends his hands, fingers curling in against his palms.

“No. It’s fine.” Sherlock steels himself. “Go on.”

Victor lightly brushes his temples again. “Haircut,” he says. “For the funeral."

“Yes.” 

“Eyebrows. They’re a bit difficult, aren’t they?”

Sherlock laughs, tension suspended. “Are they?”

“Definitely. I don’t know why, really. They simply are.” Victor’s hands retreat to the sides of Sherlock’s face, moving in unison over his cheekbones. “You’re very smooth,” he says. “But also very sharp, which seems appropriate.”  He moves down his jaw. “A bit rougher, here.”

“I shaved this morning,” Sherlock says. 

“Yes. But you don’t seem terribly—Oh.  Scar?” He has his fingers at the hinge of Sherlock’s jaw now.

“Yes. Childhood accident.”

“With...?”

“A tree.”

“You climbed trees?"

“Whenever I could. Sometimes, there were ants. I liked to observe them, but they got into my clothes without my permission. I fell trying to get my sleeve undone.”

Victor laughs a little at the thought. “Stop talking now,” he says. “If you can.”

Sherlock exhales in indignation, because _Victor_ is the one who has been talking the most, and—This is how he catches him with his mouth open, fingers dragging against his lower lip. 

Sherlock jumps, and Victor takes his hands away. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Sherlock gasps. “I’m—”

“A bit ticklish? Yes.” Victor frowns, speculatively.

 _Because you’re doing this too slowly,_ Sherlock thinks. _Because it would just—if you could just touch my face quickly, it would be like ripping off a plaster._ Because like this, he feels exposed. He can’t regulate his breathing. “People don’t touch me." 

“And here I am, with my hands all over you. God. I’m terribly sorry.” 

“You’re _tactile,”_ Sherlock says. “You’re just—"

“I’m just staring.”

“Yes. So it’s perfectly reasonable.” And _necessary._  It is a necessary exchange.

“Not if you hate it.”

“I said it was fine.” Sherlock takes his hands again, pulls them downward. “Continue.” 

“Right.” Victor sighs and presses his fingers over Sherlock’s lips, firmly and briefly. 

Sherlock doesn’t breathe through this at all. It is easier that way. With the edges of his mouth folded in, it’s not nearly as disconcerting this time. He thinks about teeth. His own, which are hidden, and will not be touched. People don’t touch other people’s teeth. 

Victor moves on to his nose, and as his hands run up the bridge, Sherlock inhales. Exhales. Minutely. 

“Close your eyes,” Victor says, so he does, and there’s something about the smoothing motion across eyelids that seems...well. It isn’t bad, exactly. It’s quite gentle. Sherlock hadn’t adequately considered the fact that there are tiny nerves running beneath his eyelashes, but there they are. Perhaps he should know what they are called.

He thinks this, and the hands are gone. 

So that’s it, then. Sherlock opens his eyes again and sits back on his heels. 

“Not quite what I’d pieced together initially,” Victor muses. “But thank you, for that.”

“It’s information. You should have it.”

Victor folds his hands over his knees. “If you wanted to, you could do the same. It’s only fair.”

“Perhaps another time,” Sherlock says. It is more than enough to look at his friend with his eyes. It would not be just or right to take it further, because unlike Victor, he is not good at knowing when to stop. 

“Well. It’s always here, should you require it.” He laughs. “The alternative would be quite unpleasant. One ought to have a face.”

 _And I do now,_ Sherlock thinks. _How strange._

“Now that I have proof you’re alive,” Victor says, yawning, “I really must get home to Gladys. I shudder to think what she’s doing unsupervised. Would you be so kind as to walk me back?”

“All right." 

Victor makes a point of getting to the door on his own, but once they step into the hallway, he takes Sherlock’s arm. “I suspect you’ll make a decent guide,” he says.

“Gladys is the professional.”

“In a way,” Victor says. “She’s not a terribly good guide dog by most standards.”

“Oh.” Sherlock starts them over the steps and down the path, considering the potential requirements in a dog. He’s never had one. 

“Guide dogs aren’t meant to be pets. Suffice it to say, she did not come head of her class. Gladys is much too fond of affection from strangers, and you may have noticed that she has even less regard for propriety than I do.”

“Yes. _You_ don’t lick my face.”

“No,” Victor says, laughing. “That would be a step too far.”

They walk on, beneath the dripping trees, and Sherlock asks, “So what led you to acquire an incompetent guide dog?”

The hand on his arm tightens almost imperceptibly. “Ah. They decided it was more important that my dog and I be friends. Gladys may not be very disciplined, but she is a devoted companion.”

“They thought you were lonely?”

Victor sighs. “Not precisely, no. Although I was.”

Sherlock stops them at the edge of Victor’s steps, waiting. 

“Two years ago, I walked out onto a frozen pond and nearly drowned.”

Oh. He thinks he sees how that could happen. It’s obvious, really. He imagines Victor, much as he is now, a dark shape walking alone, stark against the snow (Norfolk? It must have been—he would have been at home that year). Victor is good at mapping his environment, but in that landscape, blurred by winter, it would have been very easy to make a mistake. “You didn’t know where the pond began,” Sherlock states. “You couldn’t see the cracks in the ice.”

“Ah, no.” Victor’s mouth curls at one edge, and he says, in the distant voice he reserves for telling other people’s stories, “I knew exactly where it was. And perhaps you don’t know this, but you can actually _hear_ the ice. You can feel the cracks begin before they give way.”

Sherlock looks at him. 

Victor’s face shifts abruptly into something brighter. He squeezes Sherlock’s arm in its baggy wool sleeve, and says “We’ve arrived, haven’t we?”

“Yes.” 

Sherlock leads him to the door, then.

“Information,” he says softly, and as Victor turns to go inside, Sherlock lifts his fingers to touch his cheek.

 


	8. Practical Chemistry

Victor announces he’s going to Australia at the end of term. Somehow, this comes as a surprise; a signal lost in the noise of everything else. “Why Australia?” Sherlock asks, watching his friend’s fingers crawl over sheets of embossed paper. 

“My mother was Australian. I’ve got family in Sydney.”

“Why didn’t I know that?”

“It isn’t something I’ve mentioned.”

There’s still an awful lot about Victor that Sherlock doesn’t know. “You don’t want to go.”

“No, I don’t. Not really my choice, though.” Victor scrapes his hands up through his hair and clasps them over the top of his head, the wheat-coloured locks curling out between his fingers. He leans back in his chair. It creaks. “My father thinks I work too much.”

“You do,” Sherlock says, because somewhere along the way, Victor began spending all his time grimly strapped into heavy black headphones. Sherlock resents this, the loss of ease and ready conversation.

Victor thumps the chair down again with an explosive exhalation. “I don’t, not really. It just takes me twice as long as anyone else to do the simplest things. The people who do the recordings speak so slowly. It’s torture. I wonder if it’s worth it; throwing away years of my life, relying on other people to provide me with filtered information—thus ensuring that I never make any original achievement—only to rot in obscurity once it’s all over. Useless and ordinary.”

Sherlock looks at Victor’s bent shoulders, taut and sharply angled against the white cotton of his shirt, at the way his clenched jaw sharpens the indentations in his cheeks. It is odd to see obsession on someone else. It looks like despair.  “You’re hardly ordinary,” he protests.

“Well, I’ll grant you that. I do have this fundamental imperfection, don’t I? But if we set that aside, if we strip away what a brave and bizarre little engine I am for showing up and _trying,_ what remains isn’t much.”

“Don’t pretend you’re an idiot,” Sherlock says. “You’re not.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so.” Victor does not, in fact, sound glad.

“I don’t say things I don’t believe to be true.”

“No, you don’t. But you also have absolutely no idea what this is like. I lost a year of my life learning how to read again.” 

Sherlock studies Victor’s neck and the way the tips of his fingers dig into the wooden surface of his desk. Clearly, Sherlock is not comforting. It is something, he thinks, he ought to be. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to manage it. He wants to say, _You are beyond extraordinary._ He could resort to metaphor, although he shouldn’t: _You burn like a torch. You are like me._

Only he is not; he is tactile. It could be applicable.

“You must tell me if I get this wrong,” Sherlock says. He steps forward and presses his thumbs into the hollows at the base of Victor’s skull. 

Victor's skin is very warm beneath his hands. He presses, presses, and Victor exhales. “Ah! That’s—”

“Very tight,” Sherlock remarks. “Your neck supports something like 5 kilograms of bone and brain.”

“Really.”

“It’s just a range. Hard to say without weighing your head.”

Victor groans. 

“What? Am I doing something wrong?” He stops.

“Ah, no. You’re not. It’s just what you’re saying. Heads and things.” 

“Oh. Should I tell you to relax and think of a lovely beach, instead?”

Victor laughs, so that’s something. “Is it covered with dead gulls?”

“Rocks, perhaps,” Sherlock says, feeling the cords of tendon roll beneath his hands. 

“For breaking ships upon?” 

“Yes, if you like. Large rocks, then.” 

“And sirens to sing the sailors to their deaths.” Victor sighs. “Of course.”

Sherlock thinks, absurdly, of ambulances, but he knows that wasn’t what was meant. No, it’s mythological women. He wonders precisely what they’d be singing. _Stay here,_ perhaps. He considers Australia. There are massive coral reefs there, he knows, and thus parrot fish. They eat coral and excrete sand. So they’d be white sand beaches, surely.

“What are you thinking of?” Victor asks. “Your hands have gone still.”

“Parrot fish,” he answers truthfully. “And that you should unbutton your shirt.” Sherlock's fingers have run aground two inches down the back of Victor’s crisp white collar, and cannot proceed.

“Should I.” 

“Yes. I can’t go any further unless you do.”

“You could, really,” Victor says, but he undoes his second button, and after a moment’s hesitation, two more.

“Or you could take it off,” Sherlock suggests, watching his fingers twisting buttons free. “Altogether.”

“If you were anyone else...” Victor shakes his head, and unbuttons the rest without words. 

Sherlock steps back. It’s unbalancing, the sight of Victor shrugging pale shoulders free, nervously pleating cotton in his hands. “Who else would I be?” he asks. 

“Consider it wholly philosophical.” Victor clears his throat. “Go on, then.”

Sherlock returns and after a second of calculation, puts his hand on Victor’s back, just touching the spot between his scapulae. He can feel the knobs of vertebrae hidden beneath smooth warm skin. He hesitates.

“Trapezius?” Victor prompts him.

Yes, of course. Sherlock puts his hands to the nape of Victor's neck, and runs his fingers down, fanning outwards. He knows where the muscles live. It’s a matter of putting theory into practice.

“Harder is fine.” Victor bows his head, muffling his voice. “You could use your thumbs, if you like.” 

He presses his hands into the skin, watching faint pink bloom in his wake. Victor presses back and sighs when Sherlock strokes under his scapulae. Sherlock locates knots of muscle fairly easily, because Victor is thin (he can see the outlines of ribs and spine) and not terribly muscular. It’s not as if he goes in for sport, after all; just long hours hunched over a desk. Sherlock presses his thumbs down either side of his spine, feeling the drag of skin, the light resistance of nearly invisible golden hairs. “Breathe,” he says.

Victor inhales deeply and swallows, a wet sound. “You’ve been researching.”

“A bit.” Sherlock strokes onwards, back under the scapulae, and up and over to the sides of Victor’s shoulders. He presses into the joints, and has to lean in to do it, thighs hard against the back of the chair. “It’s a matter of anatomy. And I’ve done a bit of experimentation.”

“On yourself?” Victor’s voice is soft because he’s speaking downwards.

“Of course. It’s hardly the sort of thing I’d try on someone else.”

“Because you don’t touch people.”

“Unless it can't be avoided, no.” Sherlock sinks his thumbs into the muscles of his rotator cuffs, making Victor jump a little. He releases the pressure, and continues over the tops of his shoulders, smoothing in beneath his clavicles to make him open his chest. It’s very tight there, very hard to determine appropriate pressure. He can feel ribs. Victor tilts his head back, eyes closed, and Sherlock pauses, hands flanking his suprasternal notch.

He stands listening with his fingers to the rapid pulse that isn’t his. Victor’s hair is soft against Sherlock’s chest, his head heavy, incalculable. Sherlock’s hand twitches, and Victor turns his head into his shirt. “What are you doing?” he breathes against the fabric. 

“I don’t know.” Sherlock steals the sight of curling golden hair, of curved jaw and taut neck and his own hands at someone else’s throat. At the marks he pressed into pale skin. At Victor’s hands, twisted in his cast-off shirt. 

Victor straightens and pushes away from him, out of his hands and into the air. He says, “No. You don’t.”

Sherlock watches, detached by something like fear, as Victor untangles his shirt by feel, thrusts his arms back into the sleeves, and buttons it again, precisely savage in his movements. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes dark. He shakes his head. “Please don’t misinterpret this,” he says slowly, carefully, “but you need to go now.”

Sherlock has made a mistake. Of course he has. He has no right to attempt trade in a language that is not his own. “I’m sorry,” he says stiffly, because that is what he ought, perhaps, to say. 

Victor smiles, a little strangely. “No. It’s fine. I just need...I just need to get back to my work. This is—you are—a distraction. So I need you to go away for a while.”

“How long?” Sherlock asks. 

“Ah. Um.” Victor catches his lip between his teeth. “A few days. I’ll...I’ll let you know when I have time to...to talk.” 

“I wanted to—” He stops, and tries again. “I thought, because you had, once—but I’ve got it wrong.”

“No, no, no,” Victor says. “Not by any standard that matters. But please. Read. Write. Burn something, or whatever it is that you do.” 

Sherlock says nothing. 

“if you don’t,” Victor says, and it’s not really a laugh, that sound. “I can’t think. Please. I can’t do this.”

“Then I’ll go.” 

* * *

 Sherlock goes home, where the violin awaits him.

There, he has made substantial progress already, although the learning process is not without its difficulties. He suspects that the strings are too old to be stable. Still, he bends his head down above them and learns where the notes live. Music is another thing that can be mapped, he sees, because on the third day without Victor, he finds his fingers plucking out the music he hears in a neighbouring room, and it is reasonably accurate.

His first efforts with the bow result in more of a sigh than a sound, but once he locates some rosin, the inexpert shrieks he produces between lectures result in hammering on his door. 

It is a week before Sherlock sees Victor again. Long enough that he is starting to forget the details of his face. Long enough to consider the implications of touch, and what it is that he has done. His face heats up when he thinks about it (blood rushing into capillaries—proof of his own humanity). He doesn’t allow himself to think of defining words, of what _I can’t do this_ means. It slips in, though. He obliterates it, repeatedly.

Victor doesn’t write to him. Sherlock tries not to haunt the chapel.

It doesn’t matter. 

When they do meet again, it is because Victor comes to his door. 

He has Gladys with him this time. Sherlock can hear him speaking to her, in the silence after he stops bowing, so he puts the violin back in its case and opens the door.

“What was that?” Victor asks. “A violin?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you played.”

“I don’t. Not quite,” Sherlock says. “Soon.”

Victor steps in, following his voice. “Sounded a bit like music to me. Scales?”

“Yes.”

Sherlock watches as he finds the chair. He never moves it away from the desk, these days. Why doesn’t he? For this, perhaps: to see the unerring way Victor returns to it. 

“I’m not going to stay long,” Victor says.

“No. I see that.” Sherlock hovers, holds the bow to his throat and taps it there, wood against collarbone. Gladys watches him from her position under the desk.

Victor sighs. “I've missed you.”

“I’ve been here." He spins the screw loose and puts the bow away. He closes the case. 

Victor shifts in the chair (Sherlock's chair) and says, “I wanted to explain. I found I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

“But you think you can, now.” 

Victor flexes his hands against his knees. “You read people all the time. Look at me and tell me what you see.”

Sherlock does look at him: still face, blind blue eyes, long white throat rising out of a grey-striped shirt. He remembers his bones, underneath it. “I don’t know.” 

“Come here,” Victor says. “Stand in front of me.”

He does. He moves close enough that their knees brush, fighting back the simultaneous impulse to run and fall. Both bad, really: different parts of his brain singing in cacophony. 

“What are we, Sherlock?” Victor asks, and he rests his hands against Sherlock’s legs, light yet firm. 

“We’re friends.”

“Definitions are important. _Friends_ is a word,” Victor says. “I want you to think about what it means. Specifically.”

“I haven’t much basis for interpretation.” Sherlock flinches minutely as Victor’s fingers run upwards. Not far, but they do. 

“Translation’s a tricky thing.” Victor says. He takes his hands away. “I am going to finish my exams, and then I am going to Australia for a few weeks.” 

 _No,_ Sherlock thinks. _Stay here._ But he says nothing. 

“Look at me,” Victor says. “If you aren’t.”

“I am.” 

“Good.” He swallows. Sherlock watches him do it, wants— _why?_ —to put his fingers against the bobbing cartilage in his throat. “I think,” Victor says, very quickly, very carefully, very precisely, “that things are a bit...unclear. That we’ve become friends and it was all very fast. No set boundaries.”

“I’ve said,” Sherlock repeats. “I have no basis for—”

“For _what?”_ Victor asks. “Because I have had friends. I _do_ have friends. And it’s nothing like this. There is nothing like you.” 

 _Nothing like you._ His mouth is twisted as he says it, so Sherlock lifts his hand, quite without thinking. He’s never done that. He has never touched another person’s mouth before. 

Victor puts his own hand over Sherlock’s fingers, plucking them free. “Don’t.”

Sherlock studies their hands together, both pale, both long-fingered; the same, and not at all the same. “Why?”

“Because I want to be able to talk to you about this.”

“You are.”

Victor looks (does not look) at him and drops his hand. “I’m not sure I’m succeeding.”

Sherlock feels impatience, or possibly dread. “You’re uncomfortable. Or you think I am.”

“Yes,” Victor says. “If I thought it was all right, it would be a different matter.”

“It _is,_ though.” Sherlock grits his teeth. “Obviously I’ve failed to express that.”

“Are we even talking about the same thing?” 

They are, and they’re not. Language is not adequate to the task. “I don’t know,” Sherlock says, and he bends down. Before Victor has time to speak, to stop him, he presses their lips together. 

Not very well, if he’s honest. He comes in much too fast, and their initial contact is jarring. Sherlock winces as his bottom teeth cut into the soft flesh of his own lip, as Victor makes a muffled gasp of pain. 

Sherlock blinks at Victor’s startled eyes, which are close, much too close—he can see striations and flecks of pale grey in his irises—and recoils. He is acutely, desperately glad that Victor cannot see his face. 

It takes him a moment to identify his laughter for what it is. “Oh, what a disaster,” Victor finally manages. 

“Sorry. I couldn’t think what to say.” How pathetic, to be reduced to _I don’t know_ and _sorry,_ over and over again. Sherlock should be better than this. 

“A novel approach, if not a wholly successful one,” Victor says. “But you have made your position clear, so there’s that.” 

“Oh.” _  
_

Victor stands, then, impossibly relaxed and faintly amused. “Have you stopped panicking yet?”

“I’m not panicking,” Sherlock protests, but he is, he’s frozen with it. His hands are, in fact, actually cold. 

“Yes, you are.” Victor steps into him and slides his arms around Sherlock's back and puts his face against Sherlock’s cheek. “I’m not that terrifying, surely.”

Oh, but he is. Sherlock inhales, shakily, and tries not to noticeably clench every muscle in his body. He has no idea what to do with his hands. In theory, he should probably put them on Victor. But he’s distracted by the brush of Victor's lips advancing, over his face and towards his mouth. He’s distracted by the pressure of warm (clever) hands on his back. “No,” he says. “I—”

Victor kisses him. 

It is soft. It is not. It is strange. Sherlock’s hands rise to the back of Victor’s head, for the illusion of control, if nothing else. It is less disconcerting if he closes his eyes. He tastes mint, and then his fingers find the smooth line of a hidden scar in Victor’s hair. _Of course: the accident._ He’s thinking this, and then Victor’s mouth moves against his own as if he’s speaking. It makes him shudder. 

He puts his hand flat against Victor’s shoulder and breaks away. He needs oxygen. He needs to think.

“I don’t claim to be an authority,” Victor says, “but that was an improvement.” He lightly touches Sherlock’s chin as if checking for damage. “Yes?”

“Yes,” he admits, and it takes far too long.

Victor smiles, a bit ruefully, at this. “Well. I am meant to be getting to grips with the deeds of the Divine Augustus right now.”

“Ah.” 

“But he could wait for a few more minutes.”

* * *

 Sherlock sits in his chair, in the dark, hands pressed against his mouth. He can still feel the faint scrape of Victor’s face over his throat, the imprint of his teeth against his lips. A few more minutes had turned into half an hour, because eventually, he really did stop panicking. Long enough that he became reasonably well acquainted with the inside of Victor’s mouth, with the sharp edges of his teeth and the unpredictable flicker of his tongue. He isn’t quite sure how he ended up pressing him into the wall or sliding his hands into his shirt, but soon afterwards, Victor had insisted on leaving. 

“It isn’t going to read itself,” he said. He reached for Gladys, who gambolled, uncertainly, about their feet, and then he paused. He touched the door frame, just for a moment, as if, bizarrely, the wood wanted reassurance.  “I think, sometimes, you need things spelled out in concrete terms. I’m not sorry, Sherlock. I do hope you’re not.” And then he left.

It’s just as well. Sherlock needs time to reevaluate a number of concepts, and that only seems to work without active participation in them. Theory and practice are startlingly different. He had tended not to think of himself in terms of certain sorts of chemistry, but now it’s unavoidable. He wants to be able to consider it objectively. He can’t.

He had always viewed this sort of thing as _Something Other People Do._ People kiss and touch and do any number of bizarre things to each other, but he hadn’t really understood the point of it, not really. He had, historically, felt no compulsion whatsoever to try any of it himself. He’s human, male, and functional—really, that’s nothing to be squeamish about—but any interest he’d ever felt in other human bodies had been academic, at best. His face burns as he thinks about all the things he’d seen, remarked upon, derided, and not really, _actually_ comprehended. He was above all that. Or possibly broken; he had considered that, too.

 _Trojan horse,_ he thinks, and that would make Victor laugh if he said it aloud, but it’s true. He isn’t sure when this began, precisely. He can’t pinpoint the moment when their easy banter and careless, constant physical proximity slid into something else. He had been staring at him for so long now, and thinking about—well. It’s not that Sherlock isn’t used to odd impulses; he’s always had them. _Jump off the balcony; you’ve dreamed of flying_ or _Put the cigarette out on your arm; it might be interesting,_ but he doesn’t, as a rule, give in to the worst ones. 

He has now. And he can’t evaluate the action at all.

Kissing Victor was like taking too much morphine. Almost exactly like, but he won’t (he hopes) be sick. This is not considered dangerous; not by most people, although some of the particulars are statistically (societally) unusual. He can’t be bothered with that piece of it, really. That doesn’t matter. If he’s going to have an identity crisis, it’s a much more generalised one. Now he is a person who has kissed—slid his hands over, pressed his body against—another person. He had thought, _You should go now_ , but also, _I don’t want you to._

How completely, ruinously, idiotic.

He picks up the violin. He puts it down. He touches his face, and it’s familiar, but foreign. He goes to the chapel and lies on a hard oak pew in the blackness until dawn. He takes a certain grim pleasure in the thought that he has no power to appease but himself.

  


	9. The Best Thing

Sherlock is on the train. All around him are people, chattering away about their holidays, their children, their shopping. It’s a hum, a whisper. He looks out the window, takes in countryside and hedgerows and green, the endless green of an English spring. He thinks of Sussex, and then he does not. 

He stops seeing, at some point, and stops hearing, too, because the man with the cart has to speak twice before Sherlock agrees that yes, he would like to have a cup of tea. It’s not very nice; harsh and too hot in its polystyrene cup, but it’s something to do with his hands. 

His hands, that he never does know what to do with. 

He saw Victor before he left, very early that morning, and he certainly didn’t know then. Sherlock had touched his face, on impulse, and he thought, perhaps, he wasn’t going to, but then he kissed him, very carefully. It was still strange, still like the moment before the ground rushes up in a dream. Victor put a hand against his shoulder and said, _Well. Enough of that. I really_ do _have to go now._  

 _Yes, of course,_ Sherlock had said, somewhat thornily.

Victor laughed. _I’d rather not, but I’d hate to be dragged off in chains. That would be in awfully bad taste, wouldn’t it?_

_Would it?_

_Very much so, in light of my destination._ He coughed. _Well._ _It will be horrible, I’m sure. I’ll think of you constantly._

 _That’s, ah, very..._ Sherlock began, like an idiot who had forgotten how words were formed: specifically, adjectives. 

Victor squeezed his arm, regretfully, perhaps. _I hope you miss me. When I come back, there will be more time._

Sherlock promised to write to him, but he has no idea what he ought to say when he does. Diseased pigeons are, quite possibly, off the table at this point. Or maybe they’re not. He doesn’t actually know. Victor seems strangely at ease with things. 

Now Sherlock takes a long swig of tea and looks, really _looks_ at the other people in the carriage. He watches a man in a denim shirt empty the contents of his pockets onto a table, sifting through coins and smoothing out crumpled bits of paper. He watches a woman with long dark hair frown as she fast forwards through songs on a battered Walkman. He looks at their clothes, their hands, their faces, and the information slides over and through him. It means nothing. There’s a young man in the front of the car, and his neck bends _just so_ as he pages through a battered paperback. Sherlock thinks of Victor, although they are in no way alike beyond that simple curve in space. He thinks, _I can’t be like this._

That’s not something he can say, is it? _This was a terrible idea, because you take up too much space inside my head, and I can’t think properly now that you’re there._ He’d been so pathetically pleased to have a friend, to be admired, to be accepted by someone without resorting to façades. He saw (but did not see) that there was something else beneath the surface, and in a moment of panic, he’d reached for it with both hands. For Victor. 

That’s what Sherlock does; he runs towards things. It’s safer than standing still. He’s running into spears now. Why is everything about Victor so wrapped in the imagery of battle, of mythology? He speaks wistfully of ancient heroes and glory, and Sherlock never knows precisely what to make of this. The first time they met after That Night—and Sherlock deplores categorising things this way, sometimes, but he always does it—Sherlock had been stiff and silent. 

 _Don’t sulk in your tent forever, or you’ll miss the war,_ Victor said. 

Sherlock had frowned and said, _Don’t cast me as Achilles, if that’s what you’re getting at._  

Victor laughed. _Oh, but you are. Very proud. Very fierce. I hope you never know despair._

Sherlock thought, _I’ve never walked out onto a frozen pond,_ but he didn’t say it. Then, in apology for what he had not said, he let himself be kissed again. 

And it’s that, it’s always that. Lips and breath and hands. 

 _“God,”_ he says aloud, clenching his fingers around the cup, and that’s a mistake, because it tears a little at the top. He quickly finishes the rest of his tea, now cold, before the cracks extend and cause it to spill.

The plump, elderly woman to his left says “Are you all right, love?” She is peering at him with, yes, concern. He looks at her face and her hands and the knitting and the basket of fruit beside her—grapes, of course—and thinks, _Hospital._ He tests this by asking her about it, and has only himself to blame when he is treated to a half-hour lecture on the NHS, oncology treatments and her sister’s ungrateful children. Sherlock is so relieved to be right that he simply listens without comment. It’s strangely soothing.

* * *

When he alights at Paddington, it takes him a while to pick Mycroft out of the crowd. He’s in a slightly better suit, an impeccable charcoal wool, and his face creases into a smile when he sees that his younger brother has the violin case in hand. “You’re looking well,” he says, which makes Sherlock wonder what he sees. Perhaps it’s comparative. “We’ll take a cab. I’m in Kensington now.”

Sherlock looks again at Mycroft's suit, and wonders, as he often does, precisely what career path his brother is taking. More precisely, he wonders which point on the upwards slope he is presently occupying. 

“What about the car?” Sherlock asks.

“Congestion,” Mycroft says. “It's quite distressing.”

He takes one of Sherlock’s bags, and they slip through the crowd and out into the street. 

London is as grey and filthy and fascinating as ever. Sherlock’s eyes eagerly take in as much of it as they can, strange little shops and people—so _many_ people. Their cabbie is a small man with gold-capped teeth and nervous fingers. He exchanges a few words with Mycroft, and they’re off, spinning and dodging through the streets. It feels dangerous and dizzying. It feels fantastic.

Mycroft says something, and has to repeat himself because Sherlock is watching a strand of silver prayer beads whip around the rear view mirror as they make an evasive manoeuvre around a backing lorry. 

“Have you eaten anything today?” 

“No.” 

“Lunch after we deliver your things, I think.”

“Fine.”

Their driver pulls off a truly impressive parking job between two haphazardly angled sedans, and Mycroft pays him. “You’re a brilliant driver,” he says. “For a pilot, yes?”

The cabbie grins. “Yes. I was, before I came here. How did you know this?”

“Your thumbs,” Mycroft says, cryptically, and the two brothers share a private smile as their driver glances down at his own fingers in confusion. 

The building is unremarkable, one of many tall brick structures in a narrow street. Mycroft unlocks the front door, and they ascend a wooden staircase to the second floor. “Here we are,” he says, quite unnecessarily. 

The furnishings are largely familiar, although the kitchen is less modern than the one in his previous flat, the cabinetry dating, perhaps, to the 1940s. 

“Your room’s through here,” Mycroft says. Sherlock follows him into a small bedroom containing a very modern desk, a wardrobe, and a bed with crisp new sheets. Sherlock puts the violin case on his bed, and his bag on the floor. It will be good to have his own room, with a door that can be shut.

He turns back to look at the desk. There’s a Macintosh PowerBook sitting open on it. The machine reeks of expense and capability. “Time you had your own,” Mycroft explains. “I thought this would be best. Portable, so you can take it back with you.” 

Sherlock stares. “Oh,” he says, and belatedly, “Thank you.” 

“It's top of the line. Treat it well.” Mycroft clasps his hands together. “But now, lunch. There’s a little place around the corner.”

* * *

“What exactly _are_ you doing now?” Sherlock asks, poking at his sandwich. The bread has seeds in it, and it annoys him that he cannot identify them all. 

Mycroft has made it through his lunch already, and is eyeing a display of pastry. Yearning gives his face a vulpine cast. “Still a civil servant.”

“Something has changed, though. Ministry of Defence? Home Office?” 

“Department of Culture, Media, and Sport.” 

“I’m sure you have cards that attest to that,” Sherlock says, because it’s so patently false.

“I’ll have some made up.” Mycroft smiles, and this time, it’s the one with extra teeth in it. 

“New flat, new clothes, and you’ve stopped smoking.” _For political reasons,_ he thinks, and not because of their mother. 

“So have you.” 

“Yes.” 

Mycroft studies his younger brother. “How _is_ Victor?” he inquires, after a long silence. 

“Fine. On his way to Australia.” Sherlock tries to remember what a blank expression feels like, and applies it to his face. God knows he’s had enough practice, but this is Mycroft. It might not be enough.

It isn't. “Visiting his mother’s family in Sydney, I take it," Mycroft states.

“So you’ve been prying.” 

“Oh, honestly, Sherlock. If you’re going to attach yourself to someone, it behooves me to know more about him.”

“Does it? Why?”

“If you’ll recall, he managed to track me down via a restricted number while I was in Sussex. Anyone that keen to find my brother is of interest to me.”

“So you’re vetting my friends now. How tediously middle class of you.”

“It isn’t wrong for me to take an interest in your life.”

“Well, then, my dear brother. Any scandals in the Trevor line? Do they use the wrong forks at dinner? Mad uncles? Or is it convicts in the Antipodes?”

“Rather a lot of tragedy there,” Mycroft says. “But I’m sure you knew that already.”

Sherlock tears at a bit of crust. “Anyone can have dead parents. We do.”

“True. Eat your sandwich.”

* * *

Sherlock spends a few hours setting his new computer to rights; much longer than is necessary to achieve a simple dialup connection. Once he’s done it, he looks at the screen, gleaming and new and accusingly blank. He folds it closed. He gets up and rearranges the contents of the wardrobe, first by colour, which is boring, and then by texture, which is only marginally more interesting. His clothes exist in a narrow spectrum: function. 

In the other room, he can hear Mycroft on the telephone. He’s laughing. Sherlock finds this both jarring and irresistibly novel. He drifts out into the kitchen, where Mycroft is perched on a stool, jacket off and feet hooked around the wooden legs with shocking disregard for the leather of his handmade shoes. Sherlock leans against the glossy new refrigerator (naturally, that would be new) and watches him.

“Oh yes, _”_ Mycroft drawls, and laughs again. “I will.” It is then that he catches his brother’s eye, and the amused and unguarded expression on his face is immediately shuttered away. “Sorry,” he says abruptly into the mouthpiece. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this short. No, no. It’s fine.” He straightens in his chair and puts both feet on the floor. “Yes, that would be lovely.” And then he replaces the receiver in its pristine white cradle.

“Dear God,” Sherlock says. “Who was that?” He runs the possibilities through his head, and each time, the equation is stalled by the addition of Mycroft as a variable. 

“Merely a colleague.”

 _An attractive colleague,_ Sherlock thinks, because despite his brother’s known history, it’s the only thing that fits what he’s just heard. “Did I witness you _flirting?”_

“Don’t be ridiculous.” A faint suggestion of colour passes over Mycroft’s sallow cheeks, and dissipates just as quickly as it appears. 

“You _were_. New job requirement, is it? Get a girlfriend for Queen and country?”

“No,” Mycroft says. “Although it should not be any concern of yours if I did.”

“Oh? _If you’re going to attach yourself to someone, it behooves me to know more,”_ Sherlock quotes, and immediately regrets having taken the low road when Mycroft raises a sharp eyebrow at him.

“Is there something you’ve been meaning to tell me?” 

“None of my business who you shag.” 

“There’s no need for vulgarity.” Mycroft sighs. “Although you’re quite right. I apologise for my earlier intrusion.” He gets up and reaches for the cupboard over the sink. “Drink?” he asks. 

Sherlock watches him take down a bottle of Bordeaux. Then he fetches out two glasses and a sleek folding corkscrew. “About Victor. I am merely concerned,” Mycroft continues, working at the bottle with his back turned to his brother. “You didn’t have friends when we were children.” 

“How could I?” Sherlock accepts a glass, but he doesn’t drink. “Anyone interesting was inappropriate. Anyone appropriate was dull.” 

Mycroft returns to his seat. “There was school. It’s a pity you never found anyone of genuine interest there. No, I’m not blaming you; I’m making an observation. I _did_ have friends, but now I have colleagues and acquaintances. I’m aware of the difference.” He makes a wry face, and sips his wine. “This should have been allowed to breathe,” he remarks, “but it’s still quite decent.”

 _“I_ should be allowed to breathe,” Sherlock says, pointedly. 

“Don’t mistake my concern for restriction, Sherlock.”

“Why not? The end result is the same.” 

“I look after you. Someone must.”

“I’m not a child.” 

“No. You’re not. But you have very little regard for your own safety, and sometimes you’re terribly naive. Particularly with regard to social nuance. You have a tendency to follow up idealisation with severe disillusionment. I _am_ glad you have a friend. It would be a shame to see your trust misplaced.”

“It isn’t.”

“I hope not,” Mycroft says. “Damaged people tend to remain damaged.”

“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly. Have you enjoyed my psychological evaluations over the years? Which diagnosis was your favourite?”

“Seeing as none of them were accurate, it isn’t worth discussing. Don’t change the subject.”

“Fine. Why should there be something wrong with Victor?”

“If nothing else, you appear to find him fascinating.”

“I find any number of things fascinating. Some of them are completely innocuous.”

“Such as?” 

Sherlock glares at him over his glass and takes a vengeful swallow, resisting the urge to catalogue. 

Mycroft smiles faintly. “Take as long as you need.” After a long pause, he remarks, “An ambitious young man, isn’t he? Reading Classics, I believe.”

“That information’s easily come by,” Sherlock says. “If that observation was meant to impress me.”

“There’s nothing sinister in it. He told me.” 

“After you asked him.”

“You have a history. Doing other boys’ schoolwork in exchange for social acceptance or favours isn’t friendship. I merely wanted to be sure you weren’t being used.”

“That’s a bit rich, coming from you. But since you’re so _very_ interested, I’ll have you know it’s nothing like that.” And that’s an unfortunate turn of phrase, really. It immediately raises a question; one Sherlock would rather not have his brother raise. _What is it like, if not that?_

But he doesn’t. He simply says, “Good,” and pours himself another glass of wine.

* * *

On Monday, Sherlock goes to the British Museum.

He hasn’t been to the Egyptian wing in years, and there are new mummies. He looks at their fragile, paper flesh, and dimly remembers his own aborted childhood experiments along those lines.  _The dead are dead,_ he thinks, as he did then. There is no point in assigning sentimental value to their remains, although it's interesting that so many of these bodies are the results of ancient murders. Any real value they have lies in chemical compounds, in what little pathological data can be gleaned from ancient bodies lacking major internal organs. Death is a constant, and so is murder. Poison residues remain in the flesh, and the incisions of the embalmer can be differentiated from those of a killing blade. 

After a time, he drifts and finds himself looking up into the rolling eyes of marble horses, the muscular torsos of centaurs, and the scarred faces of heroes. Victor had seen all of this as a child, and he never will again. No one tells children on a school outing that they should take in every detail, for fear they’ll never have the chance again. They ought to. Sherlock closes his eyes and runs his fingers speculatively over a truncated marble limb, a leg. Inevitably, someone coughs at him when he does. 

He wanders onwards into displays of Greek pottery in red and black. Heroes and satyrs, spears and shields and ships: ships with sightless eyes. Gorgons appear at the bottom of drinking vessels, confronting the drunkard with accusatory stares. 

 _Did you know that ancient wine was so strong, that if they didn’t mix it with water, it made people go blind?_ Victor had asked him one afternoon. _Only the gods were allowed wine in full strength._

Sherlock responded with something about ethanol poisoning, which prompted Victor to add, _There is also some speculation that dilution accounted for Homer’s use of the phrase wine-dark sea. Is it possible that something in the water caused the wine to turn a colour nearer to blue than red?_

Sherlock considered testing this, adding water to wine in various ratios, at various pH levels accounting for the presence of limestone and other likely minerals. Victor was delighted when he suggested it, but then became crestfallen. _Ah, but we can’t,_ he said, sadly. _It’s different now._

Sherlock still hasn’t written to him. 

* * *

Sherlock is walking through Chelsea to no great purpose when he sees it: yellow tape being wound around a twenty-foot square marked in an alley. It’s dusk, so the police have the lights of a panda car trained on the spot. He’s not the only person who has noticed. Lights and crime draw gawkers like moths. 

They draw Sherlock, irresistibly.

A man lies twisted in the mud, his back to the modest crowd in the street. His formerly white shirt is dark with blood, and Sherlock looks up when he catches the light reflecting off the fragments of glass that shine out around the body like a minor constellation. _He was shot,_ he thinks, _at a very close range, and then he fell through the window._ The window, two floors up, is definitely broken. 

It occurs to Sherlock that he doesn’t know nearly enough about glass, beyond its basic chemistry. He doesn’t know what sort of force might be required to shatter a modern window in this way. He remembers, very vaguely, breaking thin greenhouse windows with a cricket bat when he was ten, and also putting his fist through a much thicker one when he was fifteen. It’s insufficient data. He needs more. He can do the maths, assuming the man is, as he appears to be, approximately twelve stone in weight. Force is easy. How much force, though, would the bullet have exerted on the body, and the body upon the glass? Enough to break it like this? It’s in shards, not the granular chunks of a tempered window. 

It’s even better when he sees the single footprint in the mud beside the body. Untreaded, not at all like the imprints of the shoes the police are wearing. Did someone hesitate beside the body, for a moment? Did a murderer—male, based on the size of the print, which is close to those Sherlock is leaving on his own side of the tape—risk checking his work before he fled? Or is its placement entirely coincidental? 

He drifts forward against the tape without fully registering he’s done it, until a hand closes on his arm, and he is jerked out of his reverie. “Move along,” the policewoman says roughly, insinuating herself between him and his view of the crime scene. A flash goes off behind her. They’re photographing the body, kneeling beside it in the mud. 

_Lucky bastards._

“Was he shot?” Sherlock asks her. 

She shakes her head. “None of your business, now, is it?” 

* * *

When he returns to the flat, Mycroft isn’t there, so he lets himself in. Sherlock’s mind is abuzz with the need to look into glass, into bullets. He’s read about them before. He has always taken an interest in crime, in murder, specifically. He’d never managed to see something like it in person before. He was quite unprepared for the thrill that came with seeing blood and torn flesh and the lines of a broken body flung against the mud. It was magnificent. It was, in fact, the best thing he’d ever done, seeing this. It makes his childhood obsession with the Powers murder look pale.

He’d eked out a few more minutes at the crime scene, observing the forensics unit at work until he was threatened with arrest. That was also thrilling, craning to overhear their analysis while being slowly pressed backwards away from the tape. 

 _Someday_ , he had thought, _I will be here by right. Not now, perhaps, but it_ will _happen._  

Now he careens into the guest room and flips open the PowerBook, eager to record his thoughts, his speculations. He is going to live at the library for weeks, and when it closes at night, he is going to haunt the streets. London is brimming with crime. It’s the best thing about a city of its size and diversity. It’s like Christmas, only without the awkward silences and petty resentments. 

Sherlock hammers out several pages of notes, occasionally hindered by the slightly foreign size and layout of the keyboard. Still. He gets it done, and at last, his brain is sufficiently stilled to notice his surroundings. Specifically, he takes in the presence of the Telnet icon down in the corner of the screen. 

Oh. 

There’s a message waiting when he logs in, and he feels an entirely different spike of adrenaline as he opens it.

 _Ah, you’re busy,_ Victor had typed. _I’m going to assume that’s the reason why you haven’t written to me, because the alternative would be dreadful. One likes to think one’s affection is returned._

_Affection. That’s the sort of word that, if I said it aloud, would cause you to make that sort of hissing noise you do when you’re exasperated or impatient. Perhaps, having read it, you are doing just that. I’m afraid you will make it more than once over the course of this letter._

_I miss you already. I’m about to get on an aeroplane for the first time in my life, and I’m thinking, not of the absurdity of hurtling through the sky for the better part of a day in a tube of metal, but of you._

_I was thinking that because I won’t see your response for weeks, it might make it easier to tell you how I feel. It doesn’t, though. I feel like I’m stepping off a kerb into traffic without Gladys, writing this._

_I’m going to attempt to get through it without resorting to frivolous metaphor or quotations from better writers. Dear god, that’s hard to do. How do you manage?_

_I'm going to try. You've been warned._

_I think you’re fantastic. I think you’re the best thing I’ve encountered in twenty years of wasted life. I am terrified that you will find me dull, and that’s not something I’ve ever felt before. You know you’re brilliant, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m used to being thought clever, but you leave me in the shade._

_It's more than that, though._

_I love your peculiar sense of humour. You say you haven’t got one, but we both know that isn’t true. You wrote me a godawful poem about pigeons, with meticulous care for metre and rhyme, as if were a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You read the books I like for the sole purpose of arguing with me about them. You notice things that don’t seem important, and in observing them, you make them interesting. I think you make me more interesting._

_You manage to do me small kindnesses as a matter of course, and I never feel pitied or stupid when you do. You have no idea how rare that is. I think you don’t even realise that you’re doing it, half the time. Or maybe you think I don't notice._

_You’re brutally honest, and I like that, too. I’m not, as a rule. I wish I was._

_This is me being honest. God, it's difficult._

_So, yes. I find you attractive. That is an understatement. I'm sure you've deduced that I have kissed a boy before. I’ve never had any illusions about what I am. You, I'm not so sure of._

_In retrospect, I must have flirted with you shamelessly. I thought perhaps I shouldn’t, but I did. I was afraid that you’d notice, and then I was afraid that you wouldn’t._

_Now I’m simply afraid you’ll change your mind. Don’t. Please don’t. I think it would break my heart._

_I’m going to send this now, before I lose my nerve._

_Affectionately,_

_Victor_

He’d written it the day before, which means he’s probably over an ocean somewhere. Sherlock reads it again, hands folded, fingers pressed against his lips. 

Eventually, he begins to write. 

  


	10. Inertia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a good time for me to point out that this is not a chapter in which the characters reunite, shake hands, and go to sit on opposite sides of the room. If you’ve made it this far, I can’t honestly imagine you expected that to be a likely outcome. A certain amount of physicality occurs. I wouldn’t call it pornographic, but YMMV.

Sherlock’s room seems smaller on his return to university, possibly because he has more things to deposit in it. He had, at Mycroft’s very pointed urging, expanded his wardrobe again, and of course, now there’s the computer. He’d been able to fit a surprising number of socks into its square black bag. Mycroft had also given him a mute for the violin, because his approval of his brother's newfound musical interest didn’t extend to enduring his efforts to play it.

Sherlock collects the contents of his pigeonhole and carries them back to his desk. He rifles through the usual assortment of announcements (dull) and lecture schedules (useful, but also dull), only to be stopped by something small and brightly coloured hidden amongst the sheets of A4. 

It’s a postcard, very battered, with a picture of the Sydney Opera House on it. Victor had sent it almost immediately after he arrived in Australia, judging by the post mark. It’s odd that he’d sent it to him here. Sherlock will see its sender in a matter of hours. 

He still isn’t entirely sure how he feels about that. His mind has a tendency to slide over the thought like a bead of mercury over glass. He reads the card.

The text is written in a feminine hand, the letters rounded and upright:

_Sherlock,_

_No one can describe this to me adequately, so I thought I’d let you take a stab at it._

_I refuse to believe Sydney has built a memorial to some sort of seafaring armadillo._

_Yours,_

_Victor_

There’s an addendum, in much smaller letters:

_I like your friend._ _He says I’ve been writing for too long. He says to tell you that he’s noticed._

This is followed by a badly sketched approximation of a smiling face and something that might be the name Meg.

Sherlock laughs a little at the absurdity of an Australian shop girl earnestly helping Victor find a postcard, taking dictation, and then being caught out when she added a little something of her own. _I can be charming,_ Victor has said, more than once. Apparently he was. 

Now, though, Sherlock’s taken with the problem of describing the Sydney Opera House without resorting to meaningless visual comparisons. He stares at the postcard, tracing the shape with one finger, and then it comes to him. He has plasticine. He’d been interested in its composition—petroleum jelly, calcium carbonate, and stearic acid; a proprietary formula, but not unfathomable—and he’s fairly sure he’s still got half a brick of it in his desk. That ought to be enough to serve his purpose.

He tosses the other papers aside and wrenches the slightly warped left-hand drawer open. There it is, at the back, behind a collection of writing implements and knives and lighters. The wrapper is peeled back, and the exposed surface is somewhat gritty. He’ll slice that piece off. He seats himself at the desk, and propping the postcard against the metal base of his lamp, he sets to work. The plasticine has hardened, and he has to knead the grey mass for a few minutes before it becomes workable. It’s almost relaxing to focus on producing the shapes, using his fingers and, in a moment of inspiration, a knife. 

The result is neither completely accurate nor particularly refined—Sherlock is not, and will never be a sculptor—but it’s certainly not an armadillo with sails. He glances at the time (too early) and goes to wash his hands. The clay has left a sticky film behind that he’d prefer to remove before unpacking his things. 

* * *

Now Sherlock stands at Victor’s door, the little sculpture balanced on a saucer in his hand. It occurs to him (belatedly) that it could be perceived as a sort of offering. He remembers, very dimly, bringing his mother horribly misshapen art projects at the age of four. She pretended to like them, at the time. He also remembers the cat bringing home beheaded mice. Sherlock appreciated those, if no one else did. Mycroft is always bringing Sherlock things, although arguably, it’s out of a sense of quasi-parental duty, or possibly the desire to improve him. Such precedent raises an interesting question. Why _is_ Sherlock standing here with a bit of clay on a piece of purloined crockery? He doesn’t, as a rule, give people gifts.

No. It’s simply a solution to a stated problem. It’s not the same. 

He knocks with the wrong hand, and his knuckles ring with the force of it. Gladys barks, on the other side of the door, and he can just make out Victor saying, “Yes, all _right._ Calm down, Gladys!”

The door opens, and Sherlock stares. He hadn’t completely taken into account the affects of the Australian sun—the angle’s so much more direct than that of England. He hadn’t expected Victor’s skin to be golden and freckled with it, his hair to be streaked with light. It’s as if he’s become another person altogether. 

Sherlock thinks, _it’s entirely possible_ _I don’t know who you are, after all._ “Victor,” he says, and then, redundantly, “It’s me.” 

His teeth when he smiles are so much whiter than Sherlock remembers them being. No. It’s simply the contrast of white against darkened skin, repeated in tanned arms emerging from crisp white sleeves. Victor says, “It _is._ Come in,” as Sherlock stands, mutely looking.

Gladys is fatter than she was before. She squeezes past her master and runs full-tilt into Sherlock’s leg. “Time off has not made you a better guide dog,” he tells her. 

“Gladys!” Victor laughs, and pulls her away from the door. “Lie down! Honestly, Sherlock, you’d think the dog missed you more than I did. She didn’t, if that’s in question. _”_

Sherlock follows them inside, and Victor’s things are everywhere; books and papers strewn about over the desk, the floor, the bed. “Sorry. You find me in chaos,” he apologises, somewhat breathlessly. “You’ve unpacked already, I expect.”

“Yes." He clears his throat. "I’ve brought you something.” 

“In light of your last letter, that’s got fearsome potential.”

“It’s only the Sydney Opera House,” Sherlock says. “Some consider it an architectural atrocity, but I suspect that’s not what you meant.”

“Oh, right! The postcard.” Victor tilts his head. “You’ve brought me an opera house?”

“Essentially.” He steps forward and puts it in Victor’s hands, avoiding the brush of his fingers. “Gently, now. It’s easily squashed.”

Victor frowns faintly in concentration, exploring the smooth chevron shapes with interest. “Clay.” And then, in dawning delight, he adds, “This is fantastic.”

Sherlock watches his floating hands, the flicker of sightless eyes. Victor is still Victor: of course he is.

“Yes. Now it makes sense.” Victor traces the roof again and nods. “I must say, no one has ever  _made_ me a building before. I feel rather special now.” 

“Yes, well. It isn’t as if I’d rendered it to scale.” 

Victor sweeps over the desk behind him with his free hand and deposits the saucer on its surface with care. “It’s glorious,” he says, turning back to Sherlock. “So are you.”

Praise shouldn’t exert a magnetic force on Sherlock—the very idea is irrational—but it seems it does. He can feel his face burning, and he hates it. Still, he exhales in a rush and says, “Can I—?” 

“Yes."

Sherlock thinks, _but I haven’t finished asking you the question._

He’s standing very close now, and it’s confounding to note so many details warped by memory. Little things, like the way a minuscule number of hairs at the ends of Victor’s eyebrows break free of the line. His face is more angular than Sherlock had remembered it being over the last few weeks, and his shoulders aren’t as narrow. Somehow, he’d also managed to lose the very minor disparity in their height; that Victor is, perhaps, half an inch taller than Sherlock is. He’d forgotten the length of his eyelashes, tips now bleached a bit with sun. He’d forgotten the particular way his hair curls over the tips of his ears. His lips are slightly chapped: sun, again.

“Are you staring at me?” Victor asks, but not as if he minds. 

Sherlock wonders if it’s actual theft if staring is allowed. Victor’s email had made him suspect again that it was, but now he’s not so sure. He thinks _yes,_ lines it through, and it doesn’t mean much. Inevitably, he allows them drift together, hands and faces and lips. Oh yes, he’d forgotten that, too: fading mint on Victor’s breath, leading into almost imperceptibly roughened lips with a hint of teeth and tongue behind them. There are hands on his back now. He feels the hard curve of skull against his palms, and curling hair threaded between his fingers. 

How nebulous Victor had become, in absentia. Now he falls into focus like a flash of light catching the edges of broken glass. It is beautiful and dreadful, but Sherlock isn’t going to stop observing anything now he's begun.

“You don’t have to _be_ anywhere, do you?” Victor asks.

“No,” Sherlock says. “I don’t.”

* * *

He wakes up. He sleeps sometimes, therefore it stands to reason that he wakes. 

This time, though, it’s—

Start with something basic: it’s dark. He has no idea what time it is, but it might be reasonably late. He’s been here for hours. Five? Possibly; it’s hard to gauge the precise figure based on ambient sound alone. Victor’s neighbours aren’t much for drunken hall ramblings and slamming doors; they are a different breed to Sebastian and his hangers-on. 

Sherlock's next observation is the one he ought to have started with, but it’s unsettling enough to warrant being shunted down the queue. To wit: he is in Victor’s bed (not new), with Victor (also not new), but this time he is keenly and excruciatingly aware of this fact because there’s a long arm draped across his chest, and an angular face is pressing into his shoulder. Sherlock's  _bare_ shoulder, to be precise. Victor’s bare, somewhat sweaty arm.

This is consequence.

It’s surprising how easily Sherlock had fallen into sleep like this. He shouldn’t have thought that likely, although on a strictly physiological level, it’s not entirely—

 _Oh, shut up._ He sets his teeth and tries to think coherently. That would be easier if he didn’t abruptly remember Mycroft saying S _ometimes you’re terribly naive._

He isn’t. Not really. 

He returns to the beginning. They hadn’t spoken much at all, beyond a certain point. Just _can I_ and _yes_ and _why are there books all over everything,_ followed by some startled profanity from Sherlock. These last two items could have been avoided: Victor was the one who’d left several books on the bed, and Sherlock could have looked where he was going, rather than barking his shin on the metal part of the bed frame. Still, they’d sorted it out, as well as anyone ever does, he imagines: the problem of buttons, the shock of hands on skin. The alignment of bodies in space.

Friction. 

Oh, but really it’s surprising how wrong Sherlock's assumptions had been, yet again, on a number of points. Not the technical details—why are the words for these things so stupid?—but the overwhelming quality of the experience, the rate of escalation. He remembers it in pieces: the involuntary twitch of muscle, taxed nerves, interrupted breath. Victor had shuddered and whispered something completely unintelligible against his mouth, and he’s still trying to identify the language, if it was one.

He stops himself again.

Now he _should_ be able to manage linear thought. He should, but he can’t. He is distracted by mundanities like the ache in his shin (probably a bone bruise), the certainty that he’ll need to borrow a shirt later, and his own distressingly human response to memory and proximity. It's all a jumble of longing and distaste. In an ideal world, he’d have fled to recompose himself, but he didn’t; he fell asleep. Now he’s overheated and compressed, caught beneath the sheets and Victor’s face and arm and _everything_. Sherlock can feel his heart beating in a different time, and it’s jarring. He wrestles with the bedclothes, one-handed, and it isn’t effective, although it does wake Victor. 

“Sherlock?” he says, his voice rough with sleep. He rolls over onto his back, freeing Sherlock to the air. “Oh,” he sighs, after a moment. “Hello.”

 _“Hello?”_ Sherlock repeats, because it’s such an odd thing to say. 

“Sorry. Not really awake. Just...you’re here.” Victor seems almost surprised.

“Obviously.” He claws the sheets away, and it’s such a relief to be free of them, he can almost ignore his overwhelming need to rinse the salt off his skin or possibly climb out the window.

“Oh yes. That is _definitely_ you. Good.”  

“I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Sherlock says, drily. “You seem to have mistaken me for a pillow.”

“Hmm.” Victor stretches, and the bed seems to become smaller. It was already too small to begin with. “You make a better coat rack than a pillow.”

“You make a shocking bad coat.”

Victor snorts. “If only I’d known you in primary school. We could have swapped spectacular insults during lunch.”

“If we’d spoken at all.” Sherlock looks up at the ceiling, or rather, where he knows it to be. 

“If we had. No, I would have admired you from the back of the room and written your name in tiny, curly letters on the lid of my desk. Possibly, I’d have stolen your pencil case.”

“Were you in the habit of stealing things?” Sherlock asks. “Present obstacles aside, I find that hard to imagine.” 

“Oh, I was quite an accomplished little thief,” Victor says with a laugh. “I got away with murder.”

“No,” Sherlock says. “You got away with petty schoolboy _theft._ Pencil cases, biscuits, and pocket money. Nothing more.” 

“True,” he sighs, and rolls back into Sherlock. “Sorry. It’s a bit cold without the sheet.”

“I was too warm. You were sweating.”

“In an enseamed bed,” Victor says, speculatively. “I suppose that makes me Gertrude. _”_

“No, it doesn’t. There’s no need to find a literary analogy for everything.”

“Sometimes fiction is preferable to reality.”

“Is it?” Sherlock feels Victor’s arm press up against his own, and it is cold. “Generally, I can’t say I agree.” 

“Of course you don’t,” Victor says, and startles Sherlock by running a cool and unexpected finger down his side. 

There’s really not a dignified descriptor for the sound Sherlock makes in his surprise. It wakes Gladys, and she whines. Then she barks.

“Oh hell. I should have taken her out. She must be desperate.” Victor sits up, but Sherlock puts out a hand to stop him.

“No. I’ll do it.” He surges up and over Victor, not very gracefully, and sways as the blood rushes out of his head. _Too fast._ “The room’s in a state. It would take you forever.” He limps over towards the door, and it’s like walking through a minefield. Sherlock treads on the hard corner of a book, hisses through his teeth, and does it again when he nearly trips over a pair of shoes. He fumbles for the light switch, and it takes far too long to find it.

The light is brutal and brilliant against Sherlock’s dark-adjusted eyes. He blinks, and Victor says, “That sounded painful. Are you sure you want to take her out?” 

He’s seated against the headboard now, his knees drawn up against his chest and his arms wrapped loosely around them.

 _I have to,_ Sherlock thinks, because the sight of his friend, golden and bare, is somehow too much for him to manage now.  He looks away, scanning the room for anything that might be clothing, preferably his. Gladys awaits him with surprising patience at the door. “I could use a bit of air."

“Sometimes I think I should have made do with a stick,” Victor remarks, “rather than a dog.”  

Sherlock locates his trousers and he doesn’t bother with pants, because he can't find them. His shirt is—right. Wadded in a heap at the foot of the bed. Not presentable by any civilised standard. Something not to think about now. “I’m taking one of your shirts,” he announces, shoving bare feet into his shoes and wincing at the pain in his leg. 

“Be my guest. They're hanging in the wardrobe.” 

Sherlock seizes the first shirt he sees: white with blue stripes and not at all the sort of thing he’d wear under ordinary circumstances. He puts it on, begins fastening it, and realises three buttons in that he’s off by one. “ _God,”_ he grits through clenched teeth, and starts again.

“Are you all right?” Victor has wrapped himself in the sheet for warmth, and while it’s an improvement, Sherlock still finds it difficult to look at him. 

He thinks, quite abruptly, _I’m glad you’re blind,_ and immediately feels remorse for having thought it. Victor cannot be blamed for Sherlock’s pathetic inability to reason. “I’m fine. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He reaches for Gladys' harness and opens the door. 

Gladys is surprisingly tolerant of being led, if baffled by the speed at which he takes her down the stairs. The carpeting remains horrible, the woodwork oppressive and gnarled. “I could almost like you,” Sherlock says to the dog, as he reaches the door. “You’re a convenient sort of stick.”

The air outside is chilly, and he shivers as he leads her into the grass. Eventually she finds a likely patch and squats in the ungainly and universal position of dogs the world over. Sherlock lets go of her harness and leans against a tree. He shuts his eyes. He banishes the thought of thought itself.

Too soon, he hears the uneven shuffle of feet approaching over the path. He doesn’t acknowledge them until a woman’s voice says, “Hey. Isn’t that Victor Trevor’s dog?”

He opens his eyes again, and it’s Josie Adebayo. They were in _something_ together last year; what, he doesn’t remember. She’s memorably tall and fond of shirts with slogans on them. This evening’s selection simply reads _Why_ in large white letters. “Yes,” he says, grudgingly.

She studies him, and he’s suddenly awfully aware of his sockless feet and his untucked (foreign) shirt. Then she glances at Gladys, who is finished with her excretory affairs and seated politely at Sherlock's feet. “Is Victor okay?” she asks. 

“He’s fine. I’m just...doing him a favour.” 

“Oh. I was just surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Gladys without him. So you’re a friend of his.”

“Yes.” 

She frowns. “Wait. I remember you. Sherlock, yeah?”

“Yes,” he says, and wonders how long this little social chat is going to drag on. “That is my name.”

“And you’re Victor’s friend.”

“We’ve established that.”

She smiles, then, exposing crooked teeth. “Still prickly as all hell. I’m surprised you two get on at all.”

“Oh, but we do. Like an arsonist’s dream,” Sherlock says nastily, and his smile is almost definitely one he’s stolen from his brother.

It seems to have little effect, because she laughs at him. “Yeah, I can see that.” She winks and adds, “You might want to have a look at a mirror.” She continues on towards the entrance, and she’s laughing as she goes.

Josie had been looking at his neck. Sherlock raises his fingers to the skin, and he feels it now: the faint burn of broken capillaries. _Victor’s mouth,_ he thinks, _and I—_

He takes hold of Gladys and sets out in the opposite direction. It’s time to actually, _properly_ think. Preferably without splitting infinitives any further. He has standards. They still pertain.

* * *

Sherlock is perfectly capable of adaptation, when he sets his mind to it. “Don’t expect me to stay,” he says the second time he finds himself lying naked next to Victor, cooling skin exposed to the air, endorphins singing through his bloodstream.

“That’s all right,” he answers, easily. “I don’t.” 

“I’m not your _boyfriend,”_ Sherlock announces one morning, two weeks later, stooping to retrieve his shoes from where he’d left them under his bed (so Victor wouldn’t trip). Certain remarks had been made the night before when the two of them were seen entering his room together. Sebastian Wilkes wasn’t the only wretched specimen of humanity to be found in the halls.

“No, of course not,” Victor replies. “What a ghastly word.” 

Sherlock is relieved when Victor doesn’t suggest an alternative. He really can’t be bothered with relational semantics. No, he’s preoccupied with a more physical form of analysis these days.  If he’s going to do something, he’d prefer to do it well. He applies himself to the study of Victor’s body, and it’s dangerously easy to let that take precedence over everything else.  Admittedly, there's a substantial chemical reward in what they do. He's beginning to crave that more than the fading memory of nicotine.

He doesn’t allow his coursework to suffer, although he comes perilously close to missing lectures on occasion. Victor is a bit less cautious, and that’s something of a surprise. Sherlock isn’t the sort of person who cares what other people choose to do with their lives, but even he is moved to comment when Victor receives an academic warning. It is delivered, oh-so stupidly, on a standard printed form, and Sherlock is obliged to read it out to him. 

“That’s, ah...not good,” he says, quietly, and hands it back to Victor.

He responds by crushing it into a ball and tossing it away, much to Gladys’ amusement. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll sort it out.”

“Perhaps I ought to stay away for a few days. I’d rather not contribute to your rustication.”

Victor laughs. “What a lovely, Latinate word for failure. No. I’m not about to be banished to the countryside. I’ll just have to work a bit harder, won’t I? Although that reminds me...”

“Yes?” 

“It might be a touch presumptuous of me to suggest it, but I was wondering if you’d like to come stay with me for a few weeks during the summer.”

Sherlock looks at him. “Why?”

“Because it would please me if you did,” Victor says. “You might even find it interesting. Not as gritty as London, perhaps, but it’s lovely in its way. If you’re set on witnessing mayhem, some of the locals occasionally manage the odd hunting accident.” 

Sherlock makes a derisive noise, a sharp hiss of air. “You’re attempting to lure me to Norfolk with potential carnage?”

“Well. It doesn’t happen often, I’ll grant you. But is it working?” Victor drums his fingers against the surface of his desk. “I told my father about you. Not everything; that would be mad. I mentioned having a brilliant friend with unusual interests. He suggested I invite you, actually.”

“Oh,” Sherlock says. 

Victor sighs. “You’ve plenty of time to think it over. But please do.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Good.” Victor stands and says, “I wonder whether they’ve started locking the chapel at night. I think we should investigate.” 

 


	11. Hidden

When Victor and his father meet him at the train station, it occurs to Sherlock that if there’s one thing he and his friend have never done, it is this: a simple, ordinary handshake. It is extremely peculiar to engage in ritualised greeting with someone he knows so intimately. Sherlock has always loathed shaking hands. The sensation of another person’s skin against his own tends to linger like a low-level burn for the rest of the day. 

Mr. Trevor smiles at Sherlock and says, “I’m glad you were able to come. My son speaks very highly of you.” He is shorter than Victor, slight of build, and completely grey. His eyes are dark brown, and the skin beneath them is slack and shadowed with sleeplessness, or possibly ill health. His hand, when he offers it, is frail and hot to the touch. “Call me Richard. I’m not much for ceremony.”

Sherlock says, “No. Obviously not. You’ve clearly got a hobby involving engines. Cars, perhaps? Yes. You breakfasted on eggs with catsup, quite informally, and you’ve got your own dog, in addition to Gladys. No. Two dogs, and they’re allowed to sleep on the furniture. Not sporting breeds; companion animals. Yorkshire terriers?” 

“He was right about you. How do you do it?”

“Your fingernails. Your sleeve. Your trouser legs. It’s obvious.”

“Well, you’ve got me,” he laughs. “Down to the dogs. Castor and Pollux belong to Emma, actually, but as you’ve sussed, we're a casual lot.”

Victor grins. “I named the Yorkies, of course. Gladys is at home being tormented by them now. Walk with me?” He reaches for Sherlock’s arm, and Mr. Trevor takes his computer bag so he can do it.  

“Any interest in automobiles, Sherlock?” 

“I don’t drive.” He ought to learn, though: it’s a skill worth having. 

“That’s a shame. I’ve got quite a collection. It would do them some good to get out and about. I try, but I can’t manage much these days.”

“Father’s obsessed with vintage cars,” Victor says. “I used to hand him spanners and polish the chrome, if you can believe that.”

“Only with great effort,” Sherlock replies. Victor always has such clean hands. It’s one of the things he likes about him. 

“Wait ‘til you see what we came here in.”

It is impressive: a long and gleaming Rolls Royce with running boards. Sherlock tentatively places it as an early fifties model, based on the shape. He could be wrong; his knowledge is acquired from a distant, film-based memory. “That’s a Silver Wraith,” Mr. Trevor (Richard) says, beaming fondly at it. “1954. Less than two thousand of the things ever made, and she’s all mine.” 

Victor gets into the passenger seat, and Sherlock slides into the back. The interior, like the exterior, is immaculate. Richard Trevor may be casual, but not in this. Clearly there’s a reason why Gladys hadn’t accompanied them. Perhaps it's the leather.

“Off to the middle of nowhere,” Victor announces, as the engine comes to life.

Mr. Trevor pulls out into the road. “University has ruined you,” he says, and ruffles his son’s hair.

“Both hands on the wheel," Victor says sternly.

Sherlock settles into the harmonics of the engine and thinks he ought to look at the countryside racing past, but instead, he looks at the back of Victor’s head. It is easier than counting the miles. It is easier than counting off all the ways he’s going to have to edit himself over the weeks to come. Victor doesn’t mind, but Victor doesn’t see.

* * *

Emma, it transpires, is their housekeeper. She’s a brisk, short-haired woman of about fifty. She comes out to meet them, crunching over the long gravel drive, and shakes her finger reprovingly when she sees that Mr. Trevor is carrying Sherlock’s computer bag. “You’ve no business shifting luggage in your state,” she says. Then she smiles at Sherlock and adds, “I’m sorry. I’m Emma. You must be the friend.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” he says, warily eyeing the two small dogs bouncing around her feet. They yap in high-pitched unison, displaying tiny pointed teeth. 

“What an unusual name! Is it a family thing, dear?”

“Yes." He does not elaborate.

“He’s got a brother called Mycroft, if you can imagine,” Victor says. He squeezes Sherlock’s arm, and it's subtly wrong.

“Oh my,” Emma says. “Let’s get you inside.” She takes the bag from Victor’s father, and he puts up his hands at her in joking helplessness.

“I’ll put the car away.”

The house is a box-shaped brick Georgian structure with tall leaded glass windows and an air of genteel decay. At the front, there are double doors, huge and dark with polished brass fittings. Inside, however, it is a different matter. Sherlock stares, and Emma laughs. “Not what you expected?”

It isn’t. The furnishings are all quite up-to-date and minimal: clean-lined oak and maple shapes with solid-coloured upholstery. In Sherlock’s experience, houses with this sort of exterior tend to heavily patterned wallpaper and thick faded rugs inside. This one does not. The floors are clean pine, and the walls are white. There is a striking lack of end tables.

“We’re very modern here,” Emma says. 

“By which she means, everyone got tired of me walking into things, and she hated dusting the fiddly bits, so it’s like _this_ now,” Victor contributes in a mournful tone.

“Your father wanted a clean slate, dear,” Emma corrects him. “That’s why we changed the furniture when we did.” She looks at Sherlock, and mouths, _Ten years ago._

“Not much of a stately home without it,” Victor says. 

Sherlock thinks of the house in Sussex, and says nothing. Stately is a thing that he can do without. Stately is oppressive. 

“Victor is very disappointed by the twentieth century,” Emma says, fondly. “He always has been.”

“Not _always,”_ Victor protests, but he’s smiling. “I’ll show Sherlock to his room.”

* * *

It should not be a surprise, the ease with which Victor navigates his childhood home. It shouldn’t, but Sherlock is still impressed with the way he takes the stairs. The railing is curved oak, worn smooth by the hands of generations. Once they’ve reached the landing, Victor takes Sherlock’s arm again, although it’s awkward with the bag slung over his shoulder the way it is. “You’re at the end of the hall,” he says. “Mine’s the one on the other side of the bath.”

“Not the ground floor?”

“Oh, I was stuck in the library for a few years. But in the end, I insisted on moving back up. I’ve got my pride,” Victor says. “Surely you, of all people, should understand that.”

“Yes.”

“Well then.” 

The guest room is much larger than Sherlock's student accommodation, with clean pine floorboards and a wrought-iron fireplace. The bed is a wide, high four-poster, clad in thick white paint, and covered in an airy floral comforter and an impractical number of white pillows. There is a watery-looking painting of a garden (signed _E. Hendricks_ in round letters) hung over the headboard.

“This is a girl’s room.”

“Yes. Emma’s daughter, Jane, used to stay with us during the summer. My self-appointed minder and confidante.”

“It’s very white,” Sherlock remarks, setting his bag under the massive, lace-curtained window. Outside, he can see a sea of green grass, broken by occasional trees.

Victor laughs. “Is it? I never knew. I’m just happy it no longer reeks of nail varnish.”

“Spent a lot of time in here, did you?” Sherlock asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Far too much,” Victor says. “She was older, of course. And a girl. Don’t go to leaping to conclusions.”

“I never do.” 

“No, of course not. If you must know, we listened to music and talked about boys. She did, anyway. I took notes.” 

“Figurative notes,” Sherlock says.

“Yes, of course.” 

“Learn anything useful?”

Victor’s mouth twitches with suppressed laughter. “Alone, upstairs...it seems these are ideal conditions for moral decay. Mind you, I am _not_ an eighteen-year-old girl.”

Sherlock snorts. “I’ve noticed.”

“Shall I prove that? Or would you rather shake hands again? God, that was a farce.”

“It was.” Sherlock takes seven steps and backs Victor into the smooth plaster wall beside the looming wardrobe, hands flat against his shoulders. “Morality,” he states, “is extremely subjective.” And he runs his tongue over Victor’s jaw. It is ever-so-slightly rough, despite appearances.

“I am going to ruin you,” Victor says, “later on.” 

Sherlock kisses him, hard. He bites into his mouth and savours the taste of mint and tea and Victor, and then he pulls away. 

Victor smiles. “You’ve missed me. Good.”

“I was looking at the back of your head in the car,” Sherlock says. 

“Ah.  Remember that. Only now, I think, we ought to go back downstairs.”

Sherlock lets him go. 

* * *

It occurs to Sherlock that he isn’t fond of dogs. Castor and Pollux are not discriminatory in their affections, and they are a distracting combination of damp, hairy, and kinetic. He removes one of them (Castor?) from his knee, and gratefully accepts a cup of tea from Emma. 

Victor’s father laughs at his expression. “Sorry. Not many visitors, these days. They’re spoiled.”

Gladys is down at Victor’s feet, looking martyred. He and Sherlock are seated at opposite ends of the square white sofa.

This, then, is clear. Victor hadn’t exactly stated it, but the seating arrangement and the handshake at the station have made his public position rather solid. Friends, in a very specific sense. Not the _what are we_ sort at all. 

“My boys give the house a bit of life,” Emma says, comfortably settling into an armchair. “What with Victor and Gladys being away.”

Sherlock studies her. She is quite unlike his previous experience of housekeepers; informal in the extreme, with her soft jersey blouse and sensible denim skirt. There had been several, in the Sussex house. All known by surnames, and each replaced at intervals when his mother found them wanting. 

It occurs to him that this is what passes for ordinary: something resembling a family unit, with dogs and tea and chocolate biscuits offered on a cheery yellow plate. It is exceedingly strange.    

* * *

After dinner, Emma excuses herself to the kitchen, and Richard Trevor says, “Well. Time  for a drink.”

“I’m taking Gladys out,” Victor says, frowning. “Do what you like.”

Sherlock starts to rise, and Victor’s father stops him with an outstretched hand. “No. They’ll be fine. Join me?”

He sees it, then. The yellowed eyes, the faint tremor in his hands. Victor had never mentioned this, but it’s clear that his father is slowly drinking himself to death. Sherlock opens his mouth, but his friend has already gone. 

“Victor doesn’t approve of my drinking,” his father says.  “We all have our faults, and I’m afraid this is mine.” He disappears in the direction of the kitchen, and Sherlock waits, listening to the soft sound of voices, glasses set on a table, running water, and the clink of a bottle. 

Richard Trevor returns, bottle tucked under one arm and two glasses in his hands. He gives one of them to Sherlock, and takes the chair beside him (formerly Victor’s). He raises his own glass to his lips with a sigh.

“Not your first today,” Sherlock says.

“No.” He smiles, a little wryly. “You’re right there. You don’t miss much, do you?”

“No,” Sherlock agrees. “I don’t.” He looks at his glass. It smells of oak, like the table it's sweating on. He lifts it up, and takes an experimental sip. It burns his throat. He sets it down again. 

“You’re an odd stick,” his host continues, thoughtfully. “But there must be some good in you, or Victor wouldn’t be in love with you.” He drinks again, and adds, “He doesn’t think I know, but I do. I should tell him, I suppose.”

Sherlock looks at him. “You’re running out of time.”

“I am. God. You’re...” He shakes his head. _“Chemistry,_ he said. Well. Right again. Not many years left in me, now.” He finishes off the whisky in his glass, and sets it down on the table, hard enough to make it ring. “I love my son, you know. More than anything. He’s had a rotten life. He deserves better.” He looks, then, at the painting hanging behind them. 

Sherlock’s eyes follow his, and yes _,_ he had wondered. The other walls are given to maps, and oddly, delicately inked illustrations of bees.

“Gloria,” Richard Trevor says, and pours himself another drink. “My wife.”

The woman in the portrait is fair-haired and round-faced. There is something of Victor in her smile, Sherlock thinks. They have the same eyes, although hers are sharply focussed as his never are. She’s wearing a blue dress and seated in a chair that must be long gone. The signature is not the same as that on the watercolour upstairs. It is blurred and indecipherable, although the painting itself is quite crisp in its attention to detail. 

“You’ll have heard about the accident, of course. I told her not to take the Bentley. It wasn’t braking well. But she did, and that was that. She ran it off the road. Gloria was killed on impact they say, and Victor...It was a very near thing.” He looks down at the table. “Sorry. Worst day of my life, that was.”

Sherlock is aware that there are things people say in circumstances such as these. None of them have ever seemed terribly useful or appropriate, so he doesn’t try.

It doesn’t seem to matter much, because the older man gives Sherlock a surprisingly shrewd look, and says, “Your parents are both gone, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“So you never had to tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Sherlock asks. 

“That you’re...gay.” 

“My father left when I was seven. He died when I was twelve. My mother stopped speaking to me at all when I was fifteen, and she died this year. Not that it matters. I’ve never applied that particular label. I don’t see the point.”

Richard Trevor stares at him for an excruciatingly long minute, and nods. “You’re a cold one.”

“Not much use being sentimental,” Sherlock says. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Sherlock knows the expression on his face. He’s seen it on other people’s before, so he isn’t entirely surprised when Victor’s father reaches out and takes him by the arm. It’s very nearly painful the way his fingers dig into the flesh beneath Sherlock’s sleeve. “There’s something off about you. It might not be your fault—a boy needs a father—but so help me, if you hurt my son, I will make certain you regret it.”

Sherlock doesn’t move; he simply looks coldly into the other man’s narrowed, glassy eyes, and says “You don’t know me.”

“I think I’ve seen enough. You’ve turned his head. This is all a  _game_ to you.”

“It isn’t.” Sherlock likes solving problems, but he’s never had any patience with games. 

“He’s susceptible. It would be easy. A bit of fun for you, and when you tire of him, you’ll be off.” He drops Sherlock’s arm and takes another swig of whisky, slamming the glass down hard once it's drained. The sound seems louder than it had before.

“Your mistake,” Sherlock states coldly, “lies in thinking Victor’s blindness makes him weak. It does not.” 

“Do you care for him?”

Sherlock closes his eyes. _Care_ is not a word he uses, but all things considered, it’s possible it applies. “More than anyone,” he says.

They hear a door slamming shut, and the familiar patter of Gladys’ feet. Mr. Trevor sighs. “Well. There they are. Don’t let me keep you.” 

* * *

“There are stars on the ceiling,” Sherlock observes, leaning into the doorway of Victor’s room. It is slightly smaller than his own. The stars are a pale yellowish plastic, deployed in jumbled constellations. They look childishly crude against the high white ceiling. 

Victor is on the floor with Gladys, unbuckling her harness. She has a battered fabric bed arranged beneath the window. “Are there? Oh. I think we put them up when I was nine. Mum made me a Southern Cross... It should be above the wardrobe. Everything else is northern hemisphere, though. I think Orion’s over the bed. He was my favourite. A bit of a bastard, but easy to pick out of the sky.”

“It’s just a grouping of stars,” Sherlock says. “I fail to see where bastardy enters in to it.”

“Mythology. I won’t bore you with it.” Victor sighs. “Switch off the light, though.”

Sherlock does, and the room is bathed in an eery green light. “Oh,” he says, stepping into it. “Photo-luminescence.”

“They still glow, then.” Victor stands, and Sherlock can only just make out from his silhouette that his head is tilted upwards. “I hated the dark when I was small. Strange to think they’ve been here gathering light all these years, when everything else around them changed.”

“It’s a very high ceiling.”

Victor stretches out on the bed. Unlike Sherlock’s, it is framed in golden wood, with a plain white duvet on it. There are two pillows, both stacked at the side nearest the wall. “Is there a model aeroplane by the light?”

“No.” 

“There used to be. A Spitfire. If that’s gone, I wonder which one of them decided to leave the stars.”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

“Oh.” Sherlock appraises them again, and he doesn’t understand. Plastic stars, stuck onto a ceiling, never to be seen by Victor again. What good could that possibly do him now? He doesn’t know who left them there. It isn’t really the sort of thing that leaves a mark.

“You’re hovering,” Victor says. “I can hear your feet.”

“I don’t know the answer.” 

“You don’t have to. Come and sit down.”

He ought to. He doesn’t. “You don’t look like your father,” Sherlock says, abruptly.

“That’s not uncommon. Do you look like yours?”

“To some degree.” Only when inconvenient. 

 _Burn that,_ he thinks, reflexively.

“He was rambling on at you, wasn’t he? What was it this time?”

“He mentioned your mother.”

“Ah. The melancholy mood, then. Sorry. He does that.”

“He’s a drunk.”

“Now you know why I don’t drink,” Victor says. 

“You’re not missing much.” 

“It’s never made sense to me. Alcohol’s a depressant, isn’t it? Why would anyone want to feel _more_ of something horrid?”

“Because they believe it’s better than feeling nothing at all,” Sherlock suggests, remembering what Mycroft said after their mother’s funeral. 

“Whereas I think I’d be content to stay unfeeling. I feel too much as it is. I envy you, sometimes.”

“Don’t.” Sherlock knows where this (faulty) line of reasoning goes. He’s heard it. _Disproportionate emotional response,_ followed by _no emotional response,_ and inevitably, _lack of empathy._ What Sherlock feels is more than enough; it’s outward display that ruins things. The affect of the effect.

“Your father thinks you’re in love with me,” he says, because it will change their course most effectively.

“Oh, that must have been fantastic. My wife is dead, my son is blind, and oh! He’s gay.”

Victor has never used that word to Sherlock before. It isn’t something they discuss. But he sees that while the classification holds no significance for him (might not, in fact, be valid—insufficient data), it has more meaning for his friend. “That wasn’t what he said.”

“No?” Victor laughs, a bleak, sudden exhalation. “I suppose it wasn’t much of a surprise. Still. I’ve disappointed him again.”

“You haven’t.”

“Did he say that? Or is that what you _observed?_ Was there something on his shirt sleeve that told you _I don’t mind having a bender for a son?_ _That’s it for the Trevor line, and I’m fine with it?”_

“No. He said he’d make me regret it if I hurt you.” 

“Oh god. How terribly clichéd. Are you all right?”

“He might have bruised my arm, a bit.”

Victor sits up. “I’m sorry. He has a temper sometimes. I didn’t think—oh, I don’t know what I thought. Come here.”

Sherlock folds down onto the edge of the bed, white and solid beneath the stars. “I told you. I'm fine.”

Victor pulls him back against his chest anyway. “I know you are.” He smoothes Sherlock’s hair away from his face, and then he snorts. “If nothing else, there’s no need to maintain this polite fiction any further. Unless... Do you _want_ to sleep in a girl’s bed?”

“Yours is better,” Sherlock says. “If that’s what you’re implying.”

Victor nips his shoulder with sudden, sharp teeth that make Sherlock think of the horrid little dogs downstairs. “Of course it is. _I’m_ in it.”

“Hard to miss that.” 

“You never miss a thing. But clean your teeth. I can’t bear the smell of whisky.”

Sherlock goes, but he thinks, _I_ have _missed something. I always do._

* * *

“My father’s never going to make it upstairs,” Victor says, shortly after Sherlock crawls into bed with him, “but I suppose we ought to be quiet.”

“Should we.” Sherlock is inclined to test this, and he does, slow and relentless, with his hands and his lips and his tongue. He isn't playing fair, but Victor isn't exactly complaining. Quite the reverse.

It is oddly thrilling to reduce such an articulate person to a state of complete incoherence. He's pleased enough with the results of this particular experiment that he very nearly misses part of the aftermath. 

“Oh hell, _”_ Victor sighs, his hands slackening where they’ve been buried in Sherlock’s hair. "I am." 

Sherlock turns his head aside and breathes in long cool draughts of air. “You're what?”

“In love with you.”

These are merely words spoken in a chemical glow. They need not mean anything much. Sherlock slides up to lie beside him, staring up at the mismatched constellations above the bed. They’re dimming as the photon charge departs. “Orion needs a dog." 

“Use Scorpio, if you do it,” Victor says. “There might be some justice in that.” 

* * *

The next day, Sherlock wonders whether Richard Trevor remembers what he’d said that night at the table. He isn't much in evidence  (sleeping, according to Victor), and at dinner, Sherlock takes special care to be pleasant. This is largely accomplished by letting Victor and Emma control the conversation and nodding at what appear to be the appropriate points. Mr. Trevor does not visibly indulge in anything stronger than tea. This might be the downswing of remorse; an attempt to reassert control.

The next afternoon, as the two young men return from a walk in the fields behind the house, Sherlock knows he has not forgotten the conversation, after all. Victor careens into the kitchen with Gladys, flushed and laughing. Mr. Trevor looks at his son and turns to his friend, who is carefully unhooking burrs from his trouser legs. He says, “I’m sorry, about what I said before. Perhaps I was wrong.” He offers him an apologetic smile. “Tomorrow, let’s have a look at the cars.”

Sherlock recognises the intent behind the overture. “Yes, all right,” he says. “Might be interesting.”

* * *

The cars, arrayed in gleaming ranks in the old barn, _are_ interesting in a basic mechanical sense, but there’s something unexpected and infinitely better in the apple orchard.

“Let’s go see the bees,” Richard Trevor says, latching the massive wooden door behind him. “My other indulgence.”

“Bees?” Sherlock asks. 

“My grandfather started them,” Victor says. “For the apples, I think.”

They take the narrow mown path through the grass, towards a rank of twisted trees, and there they are: three tall white boxes set at angles. Sherlock hears a whine as something very small streaks close to his head. 

Victor feels him startle at this. “You can get quite close. They’re very gentle, really.”

Mr. Trevor beckons, and they approach the nearest hive. “High time I got in there. They’ll be building all askew, with the ground sunken down as it has.” He frowns at the tree above them, which is gnarled, dry, and bare of leaves. “That old apple will have to come down.”

Sherlock follows closely and watches the complicated dance of slender, wing-blurred bodies at the narrow hive entrance. New arrivals, legs laden with pollen, scurry quickly inside as their sisters depart in a jittering flow of activity.

“Lovely, aren’t they?” Victor says. “I’ll always miss seeing them.”

His father touches his shoulder.  “I know.” 

Sherlock surprises himself by saying “I’d like to see it, if you open the hives while I'm here.”

“We’ll do it on Sunday, then. You’re not allergic to bees, are you?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“That’s good. I’ll smoke them, but sometimes they get confused.”

“They die when they sting you,” Victor says. “It’s awful. God, I cried the first time I was stung. I think I was six. It hurt, of course, but I felt worse for the bee.”

“That’s the way nature made them,” his father says. “Beekeeping isn’t for the faint of heart.”

Victor laughs. "This is meant to be your retirement."

“Ah, it’s better than shipping. I’ve got the time now. I ought to spend it with them.” He reaches up and tousles Victor’s hair. “And you, while I’ve got you home.”

Sherlock, meanwhile, is lost in observation. He moves to the next hive, where a number of bees have linked legs and poured out over the platform at the end. They pulse, in a golden brown mass and he wonders what it’s for. “Are they swarming?” he asks Victor’s father.

“No, they’re bearding. They do it on hot summer days like we’re having.”

“How strange.” 

“I’ve got books,” Mr. Trevor says. “I’ll lend you a couple when we get inside.”

“Thanks.”

“Now I know why they call them social insects,” Victor says, and laughs again. 

* * *

It’s a strange thing, that, having heard the hum of bees at close hand, Sherlock begins to hear them everywhere, even indoors. They are in the hum of the appliances of the kitchen and the wind in the trees. It ought to be disconcerting, the way his mind has taken to reinterpreting sound, but it isn't. For the first time, he has found something that makes this awkward social venture feel tolerable. He can edit himself less under the consuming force of another person's obsession.

Mr. Trevor had pried out comb, showing him the odd protuberances of drone cells and the difference between brown-tinged brood comb and white-capped storage comb. Sherlock asked questions, and he answered.  After an hour had passed, Victor’s father remarked, “I see it, now.”

Sherlock had thought perhaps he meant he’d caught sight of the queen, who’d been steadfastly eluding them, but then he’d put his pollen-stained kidskin hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, and said, softly, “You look at him the same way. That’s something.”

And Victor, who was sitting in among the trees, embossed book pages running through his fingers, said, “I _can_ hear you, you know.” But Sherlock could tell from the curve of his mouth as he said it that he was pleased.

The two of them are standing beneath the dying tree alone now, and Victor says, “Do something for me.”

“What?”

“Can you see a hole in the trunk?”

Sherlock can just make it out, about twelve feet off the ground. “Yes. Why?”

“I was like you. I climbed trees. I used to hide things up there. If they’re going to take it down, I’d like to know if I’ve left anything interesting in that hole before they do.”

“Oh,” Sherlock says. It has been years since he last climbed a tree. It might be easier now; he’s taller. But he also weighs more. 

“Don’t, if it isn’t safe,” Victor adds belatedly. Surely he knows that Sherlock isn’t bothered with safety. 

“It’s fine,” Sherlock says, and sits against the trunk to remove his shoes and socks. This he remembers well, scrabbling with long toes for foothold in the crevices of bark. 

The apple tree isn’t much against a grown man's height. He reaches for branches, and he’s forgotten how harshly the skin of trees can grate against his own. The fingers of his left hand are calloused at the tips thanks to the violin, but his palms and right hand are very soft. He can feel his skin abrading as he claws for purchase. He swings his legs up over a branch, and it’s a giddy thing to tilt the world like this again. 

“How is it?” Victor asks. He has come to stand against the trunk, hands pressed flat against it. Gladys is occupied with scratching at the roots, which is clearly well outside the scope of her appointed duties.

“Nearly there,” Sherlock says, and twists himself up into a higher fork. The wood is ominously grey here, and he can hear a creak in the boughs. “You ought to stand clear of the trunk, though. I might have to come down again quite fast.”

The hole in the tree feels warm and slightly damp. Not surprising, really. It is bound to be decomposing: alive with fungi and insect life where the wood itself has died. These are not things that Sherlock finds objectionable, so he plunges his hand inside. The space is about five inches in diameter, and his knuckles scrape against the sides as he probes about. 

“I’ve found something,” he calls, feeling cool metal beneath his fingers. He anchors himself with one hooked leg and fishes out the objects inside. There are two small rough figures and a smooth linked circlet of some kind. He brings them to the surface, examines them briefly, and stows all three in his pocket. He plunges his fingers back into the hole, but nothing further remains: just the soft fibrous grit of decaying cellulose.

Sherlock squints up into stark, twisted lines of branch and twig against blue sky, and it’s awfully tempting to continue climbing upwards. But he’s already snapped a number of minor branches beneath his feet, and Victor _is_ waiting below. “Coming down,” he announces, and sets about the odd process of reverse navigation. Descent is never as easy as ascension. It’s hard to keep it controlled.

When he alights, at last, with only minimal scrabbling and sliding, he says, “Not much in it. Just two lead figures and an old watch.”

Victor looks puzzled, and then he grins. “Oh! Lead figures, indeed. Give me those.”

Sherlock hands them over. They are two knights, rather badly made, the casting seams clearly visible.

 _“That’s_ what happened to them. I can’t think why I put them there,” Victor says. “King Pellinore and Sir Grummore!”

“Who?”

“Have you never read the _Once and Future King?”_

“No.”

Victor sighs. “Of course not. It’s ah...mostly Arthurian legend, I suppose, with lots of modern allegory thrown in. Class systems and whatnot. Might makes right.” He turns the figures over in his fingers. “You should read it. You might like the badger, at any rate. Or the ants. Or perhaps not. I never know, with you.”

“A king and a knight,” Sherlock reminds him.

“Yes. Sorry. King Pellinore was my favourite of the two. He was always going off after the Questing Beast, which had, as I recall, the head of a serpent and the body of a leopard. _Libbard,_ I think he called it, actually. He wore thick spectacles that made it impossible to joust, and he had a hopeless dog that was always winding its lead around the horse’s legs and getting in the way.” Victor blushes. “The dog’s name was never mentioned, but the beast was called Glatisant. I named Gladys after it.”

Sherlock laughs. “How absurd.” 

“A watch, though. That doesn’t ring any bells.”

Sherlock looks at it, and it’s a sleek thing, pitted with oxidation, but still clearly of high quality. The face is clouded, so he looks at the back of it. “It’s inscribed.”

“What does it say?” Victor asks.

“Hard to tell. There’s a word that looks like ‘always', but there’s something smaller underneath that. I can’t make it out. It’s a bit rusted.”

“That’s odd. I don’t remember having anything like that. It isn’t a child’s watch, is it?”

“No,” Sherlock says. “A woman’s, I think.”

“Well. We haven’t had such a dull time, after all! You’ve got a mystery on your hands, and I’ve got my knights back again. Emma might have some metal polish. You could ask her later.”

“I will.”

* * *

Emma is in the kitchen, carefully rinsing a handful of small paint brushes under the tap. _Oh,_ Sherlock thinks. _E. Hendricks._ She’s always very tidy, so he had missed the signs altogether.

“Did you do the painting in the guest room?”

She smiles. “I did, dear. I took up watercolours when Victor went away. I’m not very good, I’m afraid.”

Sherlock lies. “Oh, but it _is_ good." He counts off a few seconds and then adds, in casual tones, "I was wondering if you might have some metal polish and an old toothbrush.”

“Whatever for?”

“We found something in the orchard today, and it’s a bit rusty.”

She beams at Sherlock. “You boys! Having adventures, are you? Your hair is all full of twigs, you know.”

“Is it?”

“Victor used to come in just the same way. He certainly inherited Gloria’s wild hair. You can’t see it in her picture, but it curled like anything.”

“You knew her, then.”

“I did. You wouldn’t think it now, but I was a nurse. She used to come round to our hospital and volunteer. Such a lovely person.”

“And then you came here to live, after the accident.”

“I did know the family. Victor needed looking after, and Richard was so terribly lost. I’d just had my divorce, and I was at loose ends.”

“Ah.”

"It was a bit strange, mind you, in the beginning. But it’s been a very good ten years. I’ve no regrets.” She bends to open the cupboard beneath the sink, and pulls out a bottle of Brasso. “Will this do?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t know that I have a old toothbrush, but ask the menfolk. They might have one that wants retiring.”

“Thank you,” Sherlock says, and goes to find Victor in the drawing room.

* * *

He uses his own toothbrush, in the end. The reek of ammonia makes his eyes water, but he scrubs away until the letters emerge. 

_Always,_ _J. A._

That’s cryptic. Sherlock remembers Victor saying he used to steal things, and he wonders, now, how far that tendency extended. A woman’s watch. The most obvious answer, of course, was that it must have belonged to Gloria. Emma arrived well after Victor had lost the ability to climb.

Clearly Victor doesn’t remember why he’d had it. Why not? He must have taken it shortly before the accident. He’d have lost a bit of time, with a head injury of that magnitude. Sherlock tries to place himself in the mind of a ten year old, and he fails. Two knights and a watch. Victor lived in a fantasy world, then, as perhaps he does now. He’d named his lead soldiers, and he’d stolen a watch. What does any of it mean?

Sherlock never named anything after the age of five. 

He frowns down at the object of his perplexity, and carefully towels it dry. Then he returns it to his pocket.

* * *

Dinner begins pleasantly enough. Emma has made them a fine roast, and Sherlock is hungry enough to plough through his plate with no more than a cursory examination of its contents. Physical exertion tends to do that to him.

Richard Trevor is in high spirits, although some of that can be put down to the wine he’s sloshing with abandon as he talks to Sherlock about the neatly lettered illustrations on the walls around them. “Buckfast bees,” he says. “There’s an interesting story. Nearly died out altogether with Isle of Wight disease, but a German fellow saved them with a special breeding programme. That’s another book I ought to lend you.”

Sherlock, having already absorbed the previous three, is amenable to this. “Tracheal mites? They've been discussed, but the diagrams were disappointingly vague. I'd be interested to see something more exact.”

Victor, who has been going on about something else with Emma for several minutes—Sherlock hadn’t been listening—groans loudly at this. “Tracheal mites? At dinner? Surely those can wait until we’ve finished.”

Emma appears to agree. She turns to Sherlock. “Did the Brasso work out, dear?”

“It did,” Sherlock says. 

“We found a watch today,” Victor explains to his father. “In the orchard behind the bees.” 

Sherlock shifts to remove the watch from his trouser pocket and deposits it on the table. “Perhaps one of you might recognise this.”

Emma shakes her head. “No, I can’t say that I’ve seen it before. A ladies’ watch? It isn’t mine. I suppose it might have been Gloria’s.”

“If it was, I don’t recall it,” Mr. Trevor says. “Gloria wasn’t much for keeping track of time. She was late to our own wedding.”

Victor laughs. “That must have caused you some concern.”

“Oh, I’d no reason for worry then. She’d only just followed me all the way home from Sydney.”

“That’s generally a good sign,” Victor agrees. He holds out his hand and says, “Let me have another feel, now that it’s clean.”

Sherlock hands it over, and they all observe as Victor runs his fingers over it in silence. “No. Nothing sparks. Ah, well. Maybe the inscription means something.”

“Name and address would be a fine thing,” Emma remarks.

“It wasn’t that,” Sherlock says, but Mr. Trevor has reached over and taken the watch from his son’s hand.

“Let’s have a closer look.” He furrows his brow as he holds it up to the light, but then he turns it over, and that’s a different matter.

Sherlock wonders if he’s the only one to catch the way his eyes widen abruptly at the sight of the spidery letters, the way the faintest bit of colour leaves his face. 

“Richard? What does it say?” the housekeeper asks.

Richard Trevor closes his hand firmly and completely over the little circlet of steel, and reaches for his glass.

 _“Always,”_ Sherlock tells Emma, his eyes still fixed on the other man’s face. “And some letters. Initials, I think. A J and an A."

“Does that mean anything to you?” Victor asks.

His father swallows, hard, and says rather thickly, “It isn’t important. Just someone I used to know.” He adds, “I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind.”

“By all means.” Sherlock has committed everything about it to memory; the long process of revealing the inscription made sure of that without any intellectual effort on his part. 

He glances at Emma, and that’s interesting, too. Her lips are pressed together in a tight line, and when she sees Sherlock looking, she gives a sharp, brief shake of her head. If this _J.A._ was someone Richard Trevor knew, it seems she did, as well, and this person is not to be discussed.

Victor has missed this exchange altogether, but he remains true to his penchant for breaking awkward silence. Or perhaps it is simply the desire for inclusion; he always prefers to be at the centre of things. _“And_ we found my old knights. It seems I’d hidden them away like a little squirrel, in the old apple tree. I wonder what moved me to put them there. I don't remember having done it at all. The thought has been bothering me for hours. It's almost as if I'd meant to keep them safe from something, but I certainly couldn't have known what was coming. No one did. How absurd children are. I wish I could go back in time and ask myself what I was thinking.”

It is then that Richard Trevor’s face goes completely grey. His fingers twist and fall open, the watch landing with a crash against his plate. He reaches for his chest with a stifled gasp, his motions violent and uncontrolled. Emma is out of her chair to stop him before he goes down sideways, and Sherlock thinks _heart_ and also  _she used to be a nurse_.

He watches, unmoving, as Richard's glass topples over and red wine spills slowly down the length of the table.

 


	12. Wreckage

The next day, Emma returns Sherlock to the train station. Victor is with his father in hospital, and there isn’t much point in remaining at the house without him. 

“I’m sorry, love,” the housekeeper says. “Not much of a country holiday, was it?” 

They’re in an old red Mini Cooper with torn upholstery. _Dogs and time,_ Sherlock thinks. At some point, Emma had clearly kept something larger than the Yorkies and less subdued than Gladys. 

“Has he always had a heart condition?”

“Richard’s had a history of ill health.” Emma frowns at the road before her. “You’ve seen the way he drinks.”

“And I saw his face when he read the inscription on the watch. Who is J.A.?”

“No one Richard would want to remember, but you’ve gathered that. James Armitage. He was a nasty piece of work, by the sound of it. I never met him. He was an old school friend of Gloria’s. An Australian. He came to England about eleven years ago, looking for work. Richard sent him away from the house with a bug in his ear, but then he got unpleasant.”

“What do you mean?”

“Things were...difficult at home. James had a habit of intruding on Gloria while her husband was away, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t welcome. I told her she ought to get the police, but she said she’d sort it out herself.” 

“Did she?”

Emma turns to look at him, startled. “Oh. Of course, you wouldn’t know.”

“You’ve only just told me the man’s name.”

“Yes, that’s true.” She sighs. “James was in the car when the accident happened. They were both killed.”

"Why would she be driving with a man she didn’t trust? That seems suspicious. Surely someone made inquiries.”

“Oh, they did. But Gloria had been drinking. They found plenty of alcohol in her bloodstream. His, as well. Between that and the brake failure, no one cared to look any further. I always thought it was odd that they’d had Victor in the back. But Richard was away, poor man. Perhaps she didn’t want to leave him on his own.”

“Richard said he’d told her not to take the Bentley,” Sherlock says, remembering.

“I’ve heard that many times, over the years. It was her favourite, although she seldom drove it. I suppose she wasn’t thinking, but she ought to have listened. Richard knows his cars. Always has.”

“Strange that Victor never mentioned there was someone else in the car.”

Emma shakes her head. “Victor doesn’t know. Richard thought it best not to discuss it. But I’ve heard Richard talk, when Victor’s away and he’s on the dark side of drunk. He said James Armitage was to blame for Gloria's death, and maybe he’s right.” She sighs. “Well. He’s dead now, so that’s an end to it. We’ll never know what happened that night.” 

* * *

Sherlock occupies himself with London, and eventually Victor writes to tell him that his father is home again. Their correspondence is brief; just the occasional email or, when Victor is feeling morose, a telephone call. Sherlock talks about books he’s read and things he’s seen. Victor talks about Emma, the dogs, and very occasionally, his father’s improving health.

Mycroft is away at first, doing something inscrutable in France. Sherlock thinks it’s just as well. He hasn’t seen him since spring, and he would just as soon delay the inevitable questions about his present (Victor) and his future (as yet, undetermined). He hasn’t decided whether he intends to pursue his studies beyond the upcoming year at university. There will be more money, after that, but it might not be enough to live on. Sherlock has never been terribly bothered with things of that nature. He knows that Mycroft will insist on talking it over in relentless detail.

Sherlock takes the time alone to return to his study of the violin, the music slotting neatly into the space that had been so briefly occupied by insect life and the question of Victor’s past. It is a relief to be away from people again; to eat or sleep when he prefers, to be free of the need to modify himself for society. 

London isn’t bringing him much in terms of crime, these days. When he sees his first body in months, it is only that of a junkie who has managed to shut himself in a public toilet in a Tube station. The police have to break the door down, and the small crowd forming outside disperses when the rubber tubing around his arm and the needle on the ground spell out precisely what has transpired. 

Sherlock wonders what it would take to make anyone so careless. 

* * *

Mycroft returns, and he has nothing to say about the way stacks of books have taken over his living room as if washed up on a tide. “Visit cut short?” he remarks, instead.

“Victor’s father had a heart attack.”

“I trust you weren’t responsible.”

Sherlock considers this. “Only tangentially. He wasn’t well to begin with, and he had a bit of a shock.”

Mycroft sighs. “Did he.”

“I didn’t _say_ anything, if that’s what you’re implying. We found an old watch, and that’s what seemed to set it off.”

Mycroft purses his lips. “I did warn you.”

“How was that a warning? You said there had been a tragedy, but that was scarcely news to anyone, and it happened a decade ago.”

“Tragedy can be so much more than it appears on the surface. The Trevor accident reads like a sensationalist novel.”

“Read many of those, have you?”

“Hardly.” Mycroft permits himself a small shudder. “What does Victor know?”

“Not much.” Sherlock frowns. “The same as anyone, I imagine.”

“Ah, but he’d have been in hospital for weeks. It was in the papers, of course, but it’s not the sort of thing one shares with a child.”

Sherlock looks at him. _“She_ did.”

Mycroft knows what he means; he almost always does. “She shouldn’t have. Father’s death was bad enough without subjecting you to the details.”

Sherlock thinks of falling rock in the Pennines, and says nothing.

“Such a terrible frustration, being blind. One would only have access to limited information,” Mycroft muses, after a brief and contemplative silence.

This is true. Victor complains about it all the time. Clearly, Mycroft is thinking of something specific. “You _could_ tell me,” Sherlock says. 

“I could show you, for that matter. I’d be surprised if you didn’t see it. It struck me immediately. Of course, I haven’t met any of them. I might be wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“It can wait,” Mycroft says. “I haven’t got it here.” He sighs, and says, “Enough of that. Time we discussed your plans.”

The following conversation is so wretchedly tedious that it very nearly makes Sherlock forget what came before it. 

* * *

Emma is the one who tells him when it happens. She rings the flat, and when Sherlock takes the receiver from Mycroft, she announces in hushed tones, “Richard died last night.”

Sherlock looks into his own distorted reflection in the polished metal refrigerator door, and says, “His heart again?”

“I’m afraid it was, dear. These things tend to repeat. He was much better, but he collapsed in the barn, working on the Rolls.” 

“Oh.”

“Victor’s having a rough time of it. I called because I had hoped you might come and help him through the funeral.”

“Go back to Norfolk, you mean.”

Mycroft raises an eyebrow at this. He is hovering near the table, and Sherlock wishes he would go away.

“Yes. If it isn’t too much trouble. I could collect you, from the station.” She makes a small, sad exhalation into the receiver. “I know you didn’t know him very well, but I think it would mean the world to Victor if you came.”

* * *

The newspaper clipping, printed from microfilm, is a bit blurred. Mycroft is right, though. Sherlock would have to be blind to miss it. There are three photographs: a laughing fair-haired woman (Gloria Trevor, _née_ Scott), a small boy in a school uniform (Victor Trevor, aged 10), and a familiar-looking man in profile. That’s what does it: the aquiline line of his nose, the curve of jaw. Sherlock has spent the last year looking at exactly the same bone structure in various lights, under varying conditions. He’d know Victor anywhere. _James Armitage of Sydney,_ the caption beneath it reads.

Perhaps the likeness wasn’t apparent to anyone else at the time. In the photograph, Victor's boyish features lack the distinction they would acquire with age. 

“You agree, then,” Mycroft says, gravely. “I thought the resemblance was unmistakable.”

Sherlock nods. “I had noticed he didn’t look like his father.”

Mycroft looks at his brother, his eyes calculating. “Some things are best left unmentioned,” he remarks. “If you’re going.”

“You mean it wouldn’t do him any good to know.”

“It would not.”

“I would want to know,” Sherlock says. “What makes you think he wouldn’t?”

“Consider consequence. Let’s not forget what happened when you were seven.”

“It wasn’t me who told her,” Sherlock retorts. “Let’s not forget _that.”_

“I never do. But the circumstances were somewhat different, I think you’ll find.”

Perhaps they are. Whatever either of their parents might have done, Sherlock and his brother are both indisputably their children in a genetic sense. It is seldom comforting to contemplate. “So I won’t tell him.”

“Good.”

Sherlock looks over the text of the article, and it’s typical tabloid rubbish. A shocking accident in a rural area; he can only imagine the sensation it must have caused. Victor had been fortunate he’d been strapped into the back seat. The paper made no bones about the damage the front end of the Bentley had sustained, which was substantial. It would be, a massive hulk of metal connecting solidly with the trunk of an old tree as it had. They had not been travelling at country speeds. Both front seat occupants had died due to head trauma, and Victor’s injuries were bad enough that the farmer who’d found the wreck had initially assumed he was dead. 

Victor had never mentioned the broken leg, but children heal quickly. Sherlock is annoyed with himself for having missed any sign of this on his body. He’d certainly seen it in enough detail, over the past few months. 

Mycroft coughs. “If you’ve quite finished with that, you’d best prepare yourself. If you’re going at all.”

“I am.” Sherlock puts the clipping down and goes to change his nightwear for the funeral suit.

* * *

Emma is in a stiff black dress when she comes to meet him, and it doesn’t suit her. 

Funeral clothing seldom looks natural on anyone. Sherlock’s mother was the only person he knew who seemed to take any great interest in looking her best on such an occasion. Black suited her very well, and she knew it: dark hair sleeked into a knot beneath a hat and veil, wrists dripping with jet jewellery as if she’d been interrupted at an elegant evening affair. 

_Burn that._

Emma embraces him, there, on the platform, and it doesn’t bother Sherlock as much as it should. She’s so very small, and scented of floor wax. “Thank you for coming, dear,” she says. “It will mean the world to him to have you here.” She’d said that before, and Sherlock thinks it’s a peculiar sort of phrase. 

They find their way to the Mini, and she makes a face as she slides into the driver’s seat. “I’ll have to take the Rolls to the funeral, if we’re all to fit.”

“Have you driven it before?”

“Only once. Richard was very particular about the cars, as you know. It’s a beast of a thing. Victor ought to sell it, if he can.”

“What is he going to do now?”

She starts the ignition, and frowns. “Solicitors,” she says. “That’s going to be a bit of a mess.” 

“Will you stay with him?”

“Someone must. Of course, he’ll go back to university with you, won’t he? We’ll have to settle the rest of it as it comes.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “I suppose you will.”

* * *

Victor is upstairs when they return, and the terrible Yorkies are also nowhere to be seen. “I’ve put Castor and Pollux in the garden shed for the day,” Emma says. “As we’re to have visitors.”

She calls up the stairs for Victor, and he appears on the landing, struggling into a crisp white shirt. “Is he with you? I could use a bit of help.”

Sherlock climbs the stairs, and tries not to silently chant _Richard Trevor was not your father_ to the rhythm of his feet striking against the wood.

Victor retreats into his star-vaulted room and Sherlock follows him there. “I’m sorry,” he ventures. Out of all the possible things he could say, it is, perhaps, the best choice. 

“He liked you, you know,” Victor says, finally turning to face him. “In the end, I think he really did.”

Sherlock takes in the black jacket hanging over the chair, the tie spread out in a stark line against the white of the bed. “What do you need?”

“You,” Victor says in an odd sort of voice, but then he holds out his wrists. “Also, these buttons are horribly stiff, and I’m all thumbs.”

Sherlock does them up, and it’s obvious that these are clothes that have never been worn before. “There,” he says, and Victor pulls him close.

“Thank you. What an awful week this has been,” he says, directly into Sherlock's shoulder.

Sherlock nods. He still can't break himself of the habit. Then he says, awkwardly, "Yes. I suppose it has."

“Well. You’ve done this before, haven’t you? What do I say? What do I do? I never had to before, you know. When Mum died.”

“I don’t know.” 

Victor’s breath catches in his throat. “No. It wasn’t the same, was it?” 

“No,” Sherlock agrees. “It was not.”

“I don’t suppose you’re any good with a tie, are you? I haven’t worn one for years.”

Sherlock isn’t wearing one. “I loathe them, but I haven’t forgotten how they go.” He bends to gather it up, and it’s stiff and heavy, in unrelieved black. “I’ll have to stand behind you,” he says, running it through his fingers. “I’ve never done it the other way round.”

Victor almost laughs at this. “No. Of course you haven't.” He lifts his chin so Sherlock can get at his collar. “Undertakers must have to do it all the time.” 

Sherlock has to close his eyes for a moment and let his fingers remember the way all of it works, accounting for a change in angle and the strangeness of someone else’s neck. In the end he gets it. 

“Thanks,” Victor says. “Now I do feel like a small boy all over again. How pathetic.” 

“Jacket?”

“On the chair.” 

Sherlock doesn’t say _I know,_ but he mutely retrieves it and holds the sleeves ready. Victor settles it over his shoulders, and sighs. It fits him, well enough, but the cut is more severe than anything Sherlock has ever seen him in. He looks very tall, and very uncomfortable. Perhaps they both do. 

* * *

They make it through the ceremony, seated together with Emma in a small black row at the front of the church. The other mourners are all locals; largely gentleman farmers and their families. “No other relations,” Victor remarks. 

 _None whatsoever,_ Sherlock corrects him, silently. 

It’s a standard Church of England affair. Nothing dramatic happens, although people take it in turn to say a few words about the dead man. All of it is kind: _he was a good man, he gave us honey, he repaired my old car when no one else could. He will be missed._ Emma stands and chimes in with, “Richard was a man who loved his son more than anything.” Sherlock wonders how much she knows.

Then Victor speaks, and Sherlock thinks that in this, he is uncharacteristically unprepared. It’s shocking to hear him stumble and falter over words. Victor rambles and stops, speaking of love and kindness, and Sherlock can’t bear the way his voice frays at the ends of sentences. When he returns to his seat, he falls against Sherlock as if he’s a wall. 

* * *

Back at the house, Victor seems more himself, collected and sure of speech. He and Sherlock sit close together at the end of the love seat. He fidgets with the black ribbon Emma has tied to Gladys’ harness, but responds to proffered condolences cordially. 

Sherlock feels his own face settle into a blank, practised mask, protection against the raised eyebrows and tilted heads that inevitably come their way. The guests are scrupulously careful not to remark upon Victor’s proximity with a stranger. He thinks that's what it is. Or is it expected for friends to sit so close together, under the circumstances? He doesn't know. What if it's something else?

 _Manners,_ Sherlock thinks, as he introduces himself mechanically, over and over again, growing to hate the sound of his own voice. 

 _Manners_ , and while this is nothing like the wake of Siger Holmes, Sherlock remembers what is expected. She’d said it enough, frowning at him over cut glass and floral tributes. That was something to bury and burn, to delete and throw away, but the presence of soft, gentle voices and humble biscuit trays can do nothing to stop the memory from returning to him now. 

Emma gives him a sympathetic look and offers him a sherry, but he waves it away, and she returns minutes later with a cup of hot tea for each of them. “Oh, my poor boys,” she says. “They’ll go away soon, and then we’ll have the house to ourselves.”

Sherlock remembers Victor on the telephone, months ago: _I have absolutely no idea what to say._ It isn’t the same, but it applies.

* * *

Victor settles Gladys down for the night. It’s only when the two of them are lying side by side that he loses it again. He turns his face into Sherlock’s collarbone and sobs out his grief, while Sherlock looks up at fading stars and tries to forget he has a body. 

“I didn’t know he was dying,” Victor says, again and again. “I didn’t.”

Sherlock lies silent and thinks, _No, you did not._  But they’re not on the same plane, in this. Secrets are pressurised information, and now Sherlock’s stuck with one running riot over every single thought that has to do with Richard Trevor. Victor has lost a father, and perhaps it really won’t do him any good to know that it happened ten years before he thought it did. In this, as in so many things human, Mycroft is likely to be correct.

* * *

Sherlock stays on for less than a week, and it seems much longer than it ought to. Victor sits through long conversations with solicitors, and each one leaves him drained and quiet at the end. While this is going on, Sherlock ducks outside and looks at bees. He wonders what will become of them. They are made to take care of themselves, but left to their own devices, they’re likely to set off in search of something better. He considers how long it might take, and he wonders where they will go.

* * *

Upon their return to university, weeks later, it becomes clear that Victor has come no closer to reconciliation with Richard Trevor’s death during their time apart. His shirts hang loose and his shaving has slipped. He alternates between talking too much and too little, eyes glittering and hands relentlessly seeking. He is brittle and brilliant or he is quiet and pensive. Sherlock doesn't care for either state. 

Victor doesn’t attend any classes that week, at all.

Sherlock rapidly becomes impatient with this, and with the way Victor clings to his arm and doesn’t let him go. “I’ve got a lecture, and you ought to attend some of yours.”

“I’m failing,” Victor says, almost nonchalantly. “I was before the summer. It’s only a matter of time, now.” But he swats at Sherlock’s thigh, and adds, “Go, if it matters so much.”

He does. 

* * *

They’re lying on Victor’s bed now, suffused in a chemical glow (without stars). Victor says, dreamily, “If it hadn’t been for a bit of luggage...”

“Luggage?”

Victor sighs. “You met him, at the funeral. The man who found the car, above his field. He told me that a pile of canvas bags saved my life.”

Sherlock says, “Did they.” For all the lurid emphasis on detail, the article had never mentioned that.

“Mad, isn’t it? Like air bags, really. He said he almost didn’t see me, underneath them all.”

Sherlock’s brain kicks into gear, re-evaluating imagined wreckage. Not an air bag, but near enough. Suddenly fragments of data skip into focus, like broken glass catching light. It’s still a bit out of sequence, but a pattern is emerging. And then the last of it slots into place.

“What if he _did_ tell her to take the Bentley?” Sherlock breathes, and it’s a shame he says it aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says, quickly, but Victor’s hand appears, sudden and hard against his throat.

“That wasn’t nothing. What do you mean?”

 _“Nothing,”_ he repeats. “I’m tired. I’m not thinking straight. Forget it.”

Victor’s hand tightens. "No. You don’t get around it that way. I know you too well to believe that. Either you’ve just accused my father of murder, or I’ve seriously misunderstood you. You’d better explain yourself. Now.”

Sherlock ought to lie, but he doesn’t lie to Victor. The weight of all that suppressed information falls down around him, amplified by the threat in Victor’s hand. He says, “Richard Trevor wasn’t your father.”

“Of course he was! Don’t be ridiculous. Who else would he be?” 

“There was a man who died in the car with your mother.”

“There wasn’t. I would know.”

“There was. His name was James Armitage. It was in the papers.”

 _“J.A._ He was J.A.?”

“Yes.”

Victor takes his hand away. SherIock can see him frowning in the moonlight. “I know that name, though. _Why do I know that name?_ James....” He snaps his fingers, suddenly. “Oh, hell. How could I have forgotten that? He was Mum’s friend. He came to visit that summer, and always wanted to talk to me about school. God knows why. I couldn’t understand a word he said, half the time. Pure Strine. I remember thinking he was rather dashing, though.”

“Interesting you should say that, because he looked like _you._ Almost exactly as you look now.”

Victor stiffens beside him. “What? I look like—Oh. I see. You’ve decided to question my parentage based on a simple coincidence, have you?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence. And you look nothing like Richard Trevor.”

“Even if that _were_ true, and I can’t imagine why it would be, why would he—What makes you think my _father_ could have been capable of murder? That’s a hell of a stretch. You’d better explain.”

“Everything hinges on James Armitage: the mysterious _J.A_. His resemblance to you suggests he had an affair with your mother, likely back in Australia. Long over, of course, by the time Armitage appeared in England. What brought him here? Emma said he was _a nasty piece of work_ , and that Richard sent him away when he asked for employment. Richard Trevor was running a successful shipping concern; very attractive, if blackmail was his game. Why, though, did Armitage keep returning to the house while Richard was away, as Emma said he did? Richard could have just paid him off and be done with it. _Unhappy at home,_ Gloria told Emma, but that phrase almost always implies familial strife. Armitage, then, wasn’t the person who was making Gloria unhappy. He gave her a watch. _Always_ , it said. The gift of a lover reluctant to sign his full name, and by the looks of it, it was new when you hid it in the tree. You, I think, suspected something was about to happen. You didn’t just hide the stolen gift from Gloria’s lover; you hid your knights. Why? You believed in heroes. You loved your home. Perhaps you imagined they’d guard it for you while you were away; you were young, and more than a bit sentimental. We know that there was a considerable quantity of luggage in the car, which suggests something more serious than an evening jaunt to the cinema. Finally, a drunken Richard Trevor once told Emma that he held Armitage responsible for the accident. An odd thing to have said, when everyone knows that Gloria was driving. If Armitage were running off with Gloria, though, that would be different. _I told her not to take the Bentley_ , he said to anyone who would listen. But if he knew that Gloria was leaving him, it would be a simple thing to tell her, instead, that she _ought_ to take the Bentley. It was, after all, her favourite. Richard was a skilled mechanic, and obsessive over the condition of his cars. It seems unlikely he’d have let it sit with faulty brakes for long. Perhaps there was a reason. Finally, after the accident, he changed over the furniture, ostensibly to make things easier for you, but you _preferred_ the original furnishings. Surely a blind child would have found the familiar more accessible. No, that was the act of a guilty man. He couldn’t bear the constant reminder of what he’d done to his wife, and very nearly done to you. He kept her portrait in the dining room; a room he rarely entered unless visitors were present, and he had a bottle of whisky in his hand.”

This is so much more than he’d intended to reveal, but once he begins, he cannot stop; words race after words, until he has finished. He glances anxiously at Victor’s face, then, but it’s perfectly still, eyes wide open and fixed on nothing.

“They were always rowing,” Victor says, sounding dazed. “I do remember that.” 

“And nothing else? Nothing about the day of the accident?”

“No. _I told you._ I lost weeks.”

“We’ll never know, then. Consider it insufficient data. Forget I said anything.”

 _“Forget?_ How can I? You’ve got a lot of bloody nerve, making an insane accusation like that, to my face. This isn’t something I can forget, and it sure as hell isn’t something I can forgive.” He sits, bolt upright, and Sherlock is still close enough that he can feel him shaking with rage. “Get out of my bed. Now.”

“Because of what I said.”

“Yes. I can’t... This is...” Victor pushes against him, hard, with both hands. “Just go.”

“I might be wrong,” Sherlock says, but he swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Sometimes I am.”

“As you say, we’ll never know now,” Victor tells him, quietly. “But the damage is done. _We_ are done.”

It takes great effort to attempt a repair, but Sherlock does, through gritted teeth. “Victor. You _know_ what I am. That I can’t—that I say things I shouldn’t. It’s just...when the pieces fit together, I can’t stop. It pours out, and I can’t stop it. I don’t care, most of the time, but this is different. It’s awful. I know that. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

Victor laughs, and it‘s a horrible sound. “Sorry? When are you _ever_ sorry? You’ve always said it’s a waste of time, being sorry. And because I’m an idiot, I always thought that was charming. I even admired you for it, when it should have been a warning. Everyone told me about you, and god help me, I never cared. But you _are_ poison. They were right about that.”

“It was only a possibility. _I told you,”_ Sherlock says again, into his own folded hands, and he knows as he says it that he’s taken the wrong tack. _Sorry:_ he should have stuck to that.

“And what a massive fucking comfort that is, you being only _possibly_ wrong,” Victor spits out. “How could you _think..._ How could you _say_ something like that to me? You’ve just told me my father was a murderer. I suppose it doesn’t matter to you that it also implies he very nearly killed me, as well. _That’s not possible_. He loved me. I know he did. Not that you know anything about that, do you? You don’t even understand the meaning of the word love. I was a fool to think you ever cared for me. I suppose I was some sort of experiment, was I? God knows how long that would have gone on, if you hadn’t just made your little mistake.”

“That isn’t true.” Victor’s wrong about the circumstances. He’s wrong about the specifics. He doesn’t understand. “That isn’t... It isn’t _like_ that.”

“What _was_ it like, then?”

Sherlock looks at him, a pale shape in the dark, taut with fury. “You’re speaking in the past tense.” 

“Yes,” Victor says. “I am. Because this, whatever it was, is over. This is Carthage. You’ve sowed the fields with salt. We’re done.” 

Sherlock thinks of the cat, then: standing over its body, not being able to explain. He hadn’t killed it. Why can no one ever understand? “I didn’t intend to hurt you,” he says. “Whatever else you believe of me, _I didn’t.”_

“But you did.” This is Victor’s faraway voice, the one that spoke of the frozen pond and cracking ice. “And you would again, if I let you. That is what you are. _It’s in my nature,_ the scorpion said, when it couldn’t resist killing its transport. You think more than anyone I know, but it never occurred to you to think of _me.”_

“I _do_ think of you,” Sherlock protests. “More than I ever—” 

“Than you ever _what?”_ Victor’s tone is dangerously low now. “More than you ever intended? More than you wanted? Has it all been terribly inconvenient, going through the motions of caring in exchange for a bit of entertainment? Let’s get that out in the open, then, shall we? What was I, Sherlock? An experiment? An easier alternative to writing papers in exchange for speed?”

Victor had never given Sherlock any sign that he’d known about that. What difference could it possibly make? “You’re wrong. That wasn’t what I—It wasn’t about entertainment. And I certainly wouldn’t describe it as easy.” 

“I’ll grant you that,” Victor says, exhaling slowly. “I’ve never had to work so hard for a shag.”

Sherlock can’t seem to remember how to breathe. It’s as if the oxygen in the room has all been sucked away.

Victor laughs. “Oh, didn’t you know? You were a bit naive, weren’t you? The trick, I find, is in making someone think it’s their own idea. You took ages. Sometimes I wondered whether it was even worth the effort, but you came round in the end, despite your pride.”

“You’re lying,” Sherlock says. He must be. 

“Am I? How would _you_ know? You’ve never had a proper human relationship in your life. Never will, at this rate. Who would have you? You’re completely broken. Damaged goods. I’ll admit, I was rather fond of you when you were on your best behaviour. You were certainly inventive, once you got going. No one could fault your attention to detail.”

“You said you—” Sherlock can’t bring himself to say it; not that word, the one he allegedly cannot understand. He gets to his feet and gathers his clothes.

“Oh, _that.”_ Victor lies back against the pillow, and Sherlock makes the mistake of looking at him, seeing his lazy smile, the faint glimmer of teeth. _“Did_ I say that I loved you? Well. Maybe I meant it. Maybe I didn’t.”

He puts his clothes on, not bothering to button his shirt. As he shoves his feet into his shoes, Victor adds, “Oh. Does that bother you? How sad. You can hardly hold me accountable for something I said when my cock was in your mouth.”

It is this final vulgarity that sends Sherlock over the edge. “No. The _sad_ thing is that I had actually thought _you_ were special. I was mistaken. You’re no better than anyone else. A middling intellect masked behind facility with language and shallow charm.”

“Is that meant to hurt me? Surely you’ve done enough on that score. You’re sick, Sherlock. You are fundamentally fucked in the head, and being brilliant can never compensate for that, can it? People like me, and that’s something you’ll never have. I think you’ll find it counts for something, in the real world. Now for the last time, get out of my room. You repel me.”

He goes, and only just makes it out the front door before nausea seizes him and he has to vomit into the grass. 

In the end, it’s only bile.


	13. Reboot cycle

Sherlock knows this territory all too well: savage and obliterating blankness. A hole where feeling should be. A litany:  _burn, bury, delete._

He does his coursework. Sometimes, he sleeps. Those times are the worst, because he cannot control his unconscious mind. There are things he never wants to hear again, and he hears them all, repeatedly, in Victor's voice.

A week after the argument, he encounters Josie Adebayo in his chemistry lab. He assumes she's there to work, but then she stands beside his cluttered table, rather than finding one of her own. Sherlock pointedly fails to acknowledge her presence, but she says, "He's gone, now, you know. Victor is."

He looks at her, blankly. "Is he."

She sighs. "Bad breakup, was it?"

"He was failing his courses," Sherlock says, coldly. "It's hardly surprising he was given the boot."

"It wasn't that. He's going back to Australia. I thought perhaps you'd want to know."

"Well, you were wrong." Sherlock turns back to his work.

She doesn't leave. "What happened?"

"Why is that any business of yours?"

"Victor's a friend," she says, simply. "I don't like to see my friends hurt." She stands behind him in silence, for several minutes.

At length, he turns and snarls at her. "I cannot  _think_  with you hovering like this. What do you want?"

"I want to know what you did."

He swivels on his stool to face her. "Fine. You want to know? I told him that Richard Trevor was not his father, and that he probably murdered his mother and the man who really was his father. Now kindly fuck off."

Her eyes grow very wide. "Jesus. You've got to be joking."

"No."

"Was it true?"

"I'd hardly have said it otherwise."

She blinks. "How...awful."

"Yes." He turns back to the table, and really, his hand should not be shaking the way it is. He closes his eyes and tries to invoke control.  _You are fundamentally fucked in the head,_  Victor's voice tells him. It doesn't help. He breathes, and counts his breaths until the pipette clenched in his fingers feels steady again, until he can open his eyes.

Unfortunately, she's still there; he can see her dark face reflected in the glass flask before him. He grinds his teeth. "Why can't you just go?"

Josie gives him an appraising look. "You smoke, yeah?"

"Not anymore."

"Want one?"

He does. "Why? Trying to poison me?"

Her mouth turns up at one side. "Only slowly, with the usual carcinogens. Come on. I'll spot you a fag."

When they're safely outside the building, she hands him a cigarette and her lighter. He flicks it open (a nice one - not the plastic disposable sort), and leans into the flame. The first drag is awful. No. Wonderful. Both. He's been off them long enough that it makes him feel light-headed.

"See, you needed that," Josie says.

He looks at her, and her shirt says something in Chinese, or possibly it's Kanji. He isn't particularly interested in Asian languages. "I did," he admits, and after an awkward pause, adds, "Thanks."

"I know it's weird, me talking to you like this. We're not exactly mates, are we?"

"No."

"It's just..." She frowns, and takes a long drag off her own cigarette. "Victor lost it, you know. Pretty thoroughly."

"Lost what?"

"He smashed his computer, for a start. That made quite a noise. Gladys wouldn't stop barking. So I hammered on his door until he let me in." She takes another drag, and watches the smoke float away. "I thought it was his dad dying, you know?"

Sherlock swallows. In a way, it was.

"Yeah, well. Seemed logical, didn't it? But when I finally got him to talk to me, that wasn't what he said."

"Get to the point, if you have one," Sherlock says, and drums his fingers against his thigh.

"He...didn't actually tell me what you'd said. Just that he couldn't forgive you for it."

"That's scarcely new information."

"Ever seen Victor at a loss for words? I hadn't, before that. He's, ah...you know how he is." She shrugs. "Anyway. I told him he was well shot of you. No offence. And you know what he said?  _Maybe I am. But I didn't have to make him hate me. I didn't have to say the things I said."_

"What if they were true?"

"Not for me to say, really." She frowns, and scuffs the grass with a battered trainer. "I think everyone is owed a chance to make apologies. He couldn't. So I thought, being a friend, I'd have a word with you."

"That's ridiculous."

"It isn't, though." Josie looks him in the eye, and he shrinks at the unexpected intimacy of it. "I think you ought to know he loves you. No matter what he said."

Sherlock raises an eyebrow. "Did he tell you that?"

"Not as such."

He nods, curtly. "He doesn't, and he never did. Don't romanticise something you know nothing about." He grinds his spent cigarette beneath his foot, and turns to go.

She touches his arm, gently. "Do you care for him? Even a little? Because if you do, just...find him. Write to him. It doesn't have to be like this."

"Doesn't it?" he asks. "I feel nothing." He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket and goes back inside.

* * *

Sherlock takes up smoking again. If nothing else, he should thank Josie for that. Over time, it works; the litany, the smoking, the increasing complexity of his coursework. Victor is almost completely obliterated, and no one mentions him again.

Sherlock works at his education—both the one the university provides, and the one he's building for himself. Occasionally, he does people favours. He falls into it, as he always has. Problems solved, questions answered, with only a modicum of social grace required. It's merely transactional. There is no question of friendship, of respect. There is no point in cultivating either.

In the final term, he takes up the use of amphetamines again, but he's careful not to take it too far. He has learned from that mistake. Whenever he's tempted to keep going, he lets a certain Greek phrase slip out of its mausoleum, and the other two are fading whispers in a distant voice. He's beginning to forget whose it was, and that's all to the good.

He takes a first, and falls into an internship with a chemical company, largely because it's headquartered in London. He acquires a bedsit in Brixton, which is dismal, cheap, and smells of ammonia in the stairwell. Eventually, he finds this intolerable, so he amuses himself by painting invisible, somewhat vulgar messages on the walls in phenolphthalein. The next time the cleaning lady comes through, lurid pink text emerges under her sponge. Sherlock congratulates himself on his penmanship, and sets about finding another place to live.

He isn't particularly challenged by the internship. If the world needs more solvents and surfactants, let someone else, someone  _ordinary,_  do the work. He can't be bothered. What he should do, really, is get into forensics. It isn't any of Mycroft's business, but naturally, he doesn't support this notion. Sherlock doesn't tell him what he's considering; he doesn't have to.

"I could find you something more suitable, if you'd let me," his brother says, sweeping into the current bedsit with a cheque he could very easily have delivered through the post instead. He glances at the books on the floor, the bed, and the table, and wrenches open the refrigerator without a by-your-leave. "Honestly, Sherlock. I'm not sure which I find more sordid: your accommodation, or your obsession with crime."

Sherlock plucks the cheque out of his hand and deposits it neatly in the pocket of his dressing gown. "Your objection is noted, and dismissed."

Mycroft frowns, and pokes at something gelatinous on the lower shelf with the tip of his umbrella. It used to be food, but now it's something else altogether. "Consider it, please. You're bored. You're not being challenged. Why not make yourself useful?"

Sherlock puts his feet on the table, displacing a stack of periodicals as he does so. "To my  _country?_  Don't be tedious. I'm sure you've got a kennel full of pedigreed chemists over at the MOD."

Mycroft seats himself in the other (rickety) chair, careful not to let himself come into contact with the sticky surface before him. "No. That wasn't what I had in mind."

"I don't care to hear what you have in mind. This is my life, and I will do with it as I see fit."

"So long as it isn't wasted," Mycroft says. "How's the violin?"

"Fine. Now there's a thought."

"Oh?"

"Absolutely. If I get sacked, I can always become a busker on the Tube."

"Very funny."

"Is it?" Sherlock asks. "I wasn't joking. Now do stop looming. I was busy."

He wasn't.

* * *

He isn't sacked; he's promoted. The new position turns out to be as mind-numbingly dull as its predecessor, and he finds the prohibitive dress code annoying. If he wanted to wear suits, he would bloody well work for his brother. He bides his time and resists the pathetic attempts of his co-workers to socialise with him.

It doesn't take much work to dispel any interest they might have in him. A few choice words, and he's given a wide berth by the others. They learn to leave him out when drinks invitations are issued and project members selected. Eventually, he is called into HR to discuss his hostile attitude. 

When the woman behind the desk threatens him with a suspension, he cooly offers a detailed analysis of her affair with the head of the company.

"I will not stand for blackmail, Mr. Holmes," she says, trembling with rage.

"No, I shouldn't think you would. If anything, the hem of your skirt suggests you spend more time on your knees."

He  _is_ sacked, then, and takes great pleasure in ignoring Mycroft's telephone messages, after noting the number of origin. If his brother wants to spend the money on international calls to voicemail, it's no concern of his.

* * *

In years to come, he will retain only part of the memory. He'll keep the fine white bitter powder, and all the rest is deleted. Deletion is something he has been experimenting with for years. Most of the time, it works by sheer will alone.

The need for something more reliable becomes apparent when he sees a tall, fair-haired man walking a dog in the street and his file system falls apart. 

 _I am. In love with you,_ a forgotten voice whispers over static.

Burn, bury, delete.

_I am going to ruin you._

"You  _did,"_ Sherlock says, aloud, and wonders whether that's true. While he'd spent months—fine,  _years_ —deleting everything about Victor Trevor, it seems he had not been thorough enough. Maybe it's the lack of sleep, assisted this time by nothing more than caffeine, nicotine, and days of racing thoughts. Whatever it is, words and images and feelings start pouring back into his mind in lurid, relentless detail.

He cannot scrub them away. He walks. He does a circuit over the Thames, crossing bridges and back again, hands thrust into his pockets where they touch nothing. He wishes he didn't keep remembering precisely what he haddone with them.

It occurs to him, then, that these distressingly tactile memories could be overwritten by additional tactile experience. Why not?

Elegant. Simple.

Distasteful?

Yes.

Necessary?

_Yes._

He rejects several options as overly complicated or potentially dangerous. He'll venture nothing that requires remuneration, and local subjects are to be avoided. Luckily, London is full of unattached, transient people. He only needs to find one of them. How hard can that be?

Sherlock's aware of the theory. Probability demands a certain deviation from his historical methodology, but he's prepared to accept that in the interest of expediency. He finds an appropriate establishment: one with a bar. He sits. He drinks: partly for verisimilitude, but also in a mildly anaesthetic spirit. In such a mood, in which every stimulus applies sandpaper to the nerves, he cannot afford to be derailed by discomfiting details. If he strikes the right chemical balance, though, he might just manage an optimal result. Clearly, he hasn't achieved the required mental state. He can't even manage the appropriate vocabulary. 

He drinks. He sits. He arranges himself just so, takes on a posture that isn't his. An easy air of approachability, a facsimile of charm. It's—

It's pure Victor. How appropriate. How appalling.How completely artificial, and oh—he was, wasn't he?

The association that follows this thought hails from a more distant place in memory than Victor's heroes, his gods, his glib literary references. It's a stupid little story about a boy and a vain (absurdly anthropomorphic) flower, remarkable only in a very specific frame of reference. Loved and then despised. Mycroft had had to spell it out to him, as he did so many basic human concepts: the notion that caring could bestow an unrealistic value on people and things. Perhaps that wasn't precisely the lesson the author intended. It was simply the thing that they both, inevitably, took away from the text.

No, Victor wasn't special. He wanted to be, and Sherlock, in a final bid for belonging, wanted to believe that of him. Together, they bent reality into a pleasing, transitory form. In the end, it was revealed to be a flimsy fiction.

Sherlock plans to overwrite him completely. It seems he doesn't even have to make much of an effort, because suddenly a woman slides into the seat beside him.  _You'll do,_ he thinks. She's clean, she's in his age range, and well within the societal norm for appearance. He glances at her hands, and yes, that will do as well. Married, hiding it, and thus a good bet. She confirms this by saying, "You're gorgeous" in a slurred Scottish accent. She wants something smooth with an edge of danger (not actual danger; just a cliched suave manner and a hint of brooding). This, he can manage.

He buys her a drink and one more for himself; sufficient to put him in the state that will make the coming ordeal more tolerable. They both lie about their names and occupations: Sherlock says his name is Edward, and she says hers is Jane. No points for originality there, but her expression tells him she knows that and doesn't care. Not caring is precisely what he needs.

Unfortunately, it seems that  _she_  is not. He can't go through with it. It's her perfume, or maybe it's the gum she's chewing (jarringly redolent of artificial fruit), and her insistence on kissing him after he tells her not to. He tries, he really does, but he barely makes it into her hotel room before it starts going terribly wrong, because everything in his head is screaming for him to stop _._ "Close your eyes," he tells her, but that doesn't help as much as he expects it to. He can't go through with it.

When she slaps his face, he very nearly thanks her. It's focussing, in a way. 

The next option is a bit riskier, on several levels, but after chain-smoking, pacing, and failing yet another round of deletions, he decides it's worth it. If nothing else, it might resolve some questions.

Sherlock has never gone to a club of any kind, but even he can see that this one is quite clear about its intended clientele. He steps inside, and feels assaulted: by the lights, the music, and the frenzied mass of jostling bodies at the bar. He is well on his way to deciding he's made yet another mistake when a portly gentleman dressed in something that would look more at home on a carriage horse than a human being spills a syrupy orange cocktail over Sherlock's arm.

It might be time to admit defeat. Sherlock could abandon ship, go home and take a shower of epic proportions. But his arm is horribly sticky, and that makes his skin crawl with an urgency that cannot be deferred. He'd rather not have to gnaw it off, like a fox in a trap. He scans the club for signs of a lavatory. Its location is marked on the back wall with a pink neon arrow that manages to look aggressively sexual, yet at the same time, desperately camp.

It is one more factor that is culturally interesting, but absolutely fatal in terms of accomplishing anything useful on a personal level. He pushes through the crowd at a breakneck pace. It is time to wash his hands of this experiment, both literally and figuratively. 

Sherlock believes in fate as much as he believes in a deity, but if he were to give way to base superstition, this would be the most appropriate occasion

A man is leaning over a brushed steel counter, hoovering up what appears to be a line of cocaine with a modified straw when Sherlock walks in. "All right," he says, indistinctly, and Sherlock nods, and approaches the tap.

It's definitely cocaine, and if he's to believe Sebastian Wilkes' intoxicated ramblings back in university, it is well worth the money. Dangerous, perhaps, but anaesthetic on a basic level. Also a stimulant. Sherlock has never tried it.

He washes his hands, and glances up into the mirror, only to meet the other man's interested gaze. He's probably about twenty-five, Sherlock thinks, and conventionally attractive. Brown hair. Brown eyes. He's more muscular than—Well. He's muscular, which is readily apparent because he isn't, in fact, wearing a shirt. Sherlock raises an eyebrow inquiringly, and the other man smiles, revealing straight white teeth.

He doesn't tell Sherlock he's gorgeous. He says, in a decidedly Estuary accent, "Fancy anything?"

Sherlock looks at him appraisingly. It's open-ended, that question. It's also direct.

"Yes," he says.

* * *

Cocaine, that oft-maligned crystalline tropane alkaloid, is something special. It announces itself with an overwhelming conviction of surety and power that strips away the need for all the pointless, hard-learned convention of years. Objects (and even people) are suffused with a lovely warm glow. Unlike the hyperreality Sherlock has been dodging since birth, the brilliance it brings comes without painful edges. He can think, with greater clarity than he ever has before. It's odd that anything should be so simultaneously incisive and insulatory. He's aware of the biological mechanisms in play: he seeks dopamine, and this is the purest possible form of delivery. Previously disregarded synapses spark into gorgeous symphony. It's even better when he finally graduates to the next, eminently rational step of injecting it in solution. It doesn't make his sinuses burn.

Inevitably, he dies, but it doesn't last.

"I should have known you'd do something this stupid," Mycroft tells him as the world swims into focus, harsh and white and horrible.

Sherlock can't speak. There's a tube in his throat, and he feels bruised, there and elsewhere. He would like nothing better than to sleep, but Mycroft snaps his fingers when Sherlock's eyes start to fall closed.

"You're very fortunate," his brother remarks. "You've done nothing that can't be fixed, in a physical sense. But I do have to wonder what brought you to this."

 _Nothing. Everything._  He can't even swallow, like this. He feels like a pinned insect.

"I warned you."

Sherlock rolls his eyes. Which warning, out of the millions delivered over time, is Mycroft referring to now?

"I've observed a pattern in your behaviour, Sherlock. It started with alcohol poisoning when you were fifteen, I think, although you never made  _that_  particular mistake again. You never do repeat yourself; not precisely. I suppose that passes for logic with you. Next, the morphine, I think, after Mummy died. This was followed by the amphetamines during your final year at university. That, I attribute to Victor Trevor."

Sherlock scowls, as best he can when his face feels swollen and stretched.

"At least you had the good sense to abandon that particular avenue before it became a problem." Mycroft studies him briefly, and then corrects himself. "Oh. I see. That was merely a deferment." He sighs. "As I say, the pattern is distressingly clear. I find it cause for concern."

Sherlock closes his eyes. Oh, yes. There it is. The concern. The crushing, all-encompassing  _concern_ of Mycroft Holmes.

 _"_ Perhaps it's for the best you can't answer back," his brother suggests. "Maybe you'll listen, for once."

Sherlock does answer, painfully and slowly, with two out-thrust fingers. It's the arm currently occupied by the IV needle, not the one he prefers to use for his own injections. Now both of them are bruised.

"I've been telling you all your life, but I cannot seem to find the appropriate language to make you understand. Listen to me, Sherlock. I know what this is."

Sherlock opens his eyes again, with substantial effort. If he appears to listen, perhaps Mycroft will say his piece and go. Then he can sleep.

"This is the result of your failure to deal with pain. With grief, specifically. You'd say, perhaps, that you don't feel such things, but we both know that isn't true."

Sherlock looks away, and Mycroft taps the back of his hand with one long finger. "You care too deeply. You always have. I know we're not... We're not like other people, you and I. That doesn't make us broken, or it needn't. I have my work, and you must find yours. Do it, before you make a mistake worse than this one."

* * *

The second time is different, or maybe it's exactly the same.

Sherlock finds another position, this time courtesy of his brother, and it isn't markedly better, although it is different. This job involves occasional travel, so that at least, is interesting. It's the inevitable return after every journey that is awful. He hits a grey patch, six months in, and finds it nearly impossible to get out of bed in the morning. This coincides inconveniently with a massive, time-sensitive project. When he finds himself staring at the wall for hours at a stretch, incapable of thought over the hateful sounds of other people, he decides he can be disciplined enough to try cocaine again in moderation.

He is scrupulously careful now. He arranges the tools of his redemption with clinical precision, and subjects the white powder to thorough testing before he dissolves and injects it. Much as he'd suspected, it is helpful. He can think again, at last. He finishes the project, and carries on. This time, things will be different. He restricts himself to measured doses and a set routine.

That very nearly works, until he makes a hasty mistake. One glitch in procedure, and by the time he registers that he has broken protocol, he's in no state to judge what they'd cut it with. It certainly wasn't pure.

This time, Mycroft appears  a few days into Sherlock's hospitalisation. Sherlock still feels like hell, but he's capable of conversation. Mycroft sweeps into his private hospital room, and says, "This is the last time, Sherlock. I've made sure of that."

"Oh?" Sherlock does not look away from the window and its less-than-inspiring vista of grey office towers and filthy rain. It's either that or the watercolour painting hanging over the bed. The painting reminds him of something or someone, but bits of his file system seem to have gone off line. It probably isn't important.

"I've assumed complete control of your accounts, above and beyond the trust. If nothing else, you won't have the funds to pull this off again."

Sherlock turns to face him, then, although the effect is quite spoiled by the wheelchair he's obliged to occupy. "How dare you? I am not your ward."

"Keep this up, and you'll be the state's. I'd rather not have my own brother sectioned, but rest assured: that is well within my power."

"I'm almost tempted to let you try it."

"It wouldn't be difficult. I could make a very credible case for a history of substance abuse and clinical depression. Or worse."

"How droll," Sherlock says. "Do feel free to submit any old paperwork you fancy from my school days. I'm sure you've got it squirrelled away somewhere."

"I said I could, not that I would. Incidentally, you're finished here. We're leaving."

"What? Oh. Rehab, is it? I'll be out in a week. Watch me."

"No." Mycroft stands over him, and taps the handle of his umbrella, meaningfully. "Not rehab. Sussex. With me."

"I am  _not_  going to Sussex."

"You are."

"I won't." Sherlock wheels away from the window and reaches for the call button by the bed.

Mycroft blocks his path. "No. That won't do you any good. Who do you think is paying for all of this?"

"Not the NHS," Sherlock agrees. "But let's see what happens when I start screaming."

He doesn't, but only because a surprisingly burly male nurse holds him down in his chair and forcibly administers a sedative before he does. He'd be impressed, if he weren't so infuriated.

"You aren't omnipotent, Mycroft," he slurs, as the room begins to lose its shape. "Whatever you may think."

"No. I wish I was. That would make this easier."

* * *

The third, and final, time is decidedly different. It happens years later, and it isn't Mycroft in the chair beside him when Sherlock awakens. It's a man with prematurely grey hair and an expression of infinite weariness.

"Detective Inspector Lestrade," he supplies, helpfully, when Sherlock blinks at him.

"It was an overdose, not a lobotomy," Sherlock grinds out. "I know who you are."

He shrugs. "Fair enough. I need your brain. Glad it still works."

"Oh?"

"Friends of yours found a body, down the old sewer tunnels."

"I don't have friends."

Lestrade tilts his head. "No. I don't expect you do. They were a couple of homeless blokes. They weren't eager to discuss the details with the police, but they gave me your description, said you knew the turf better than they did. And then I said,  _Oh, that's the man who's always popping up at my crime scenes and fucking with Forensics._   _The posh junkie with the mouth. Sherlock Holmes."_

"If the police were better at their jobs, I wouldn't bother," Sherlock says. "But it pains me to see mediocrity in action. No. Inaction," he corrects himself.

Lestrade rocks his chair back onto two legs. "I'll take that from you this once," he says. "On account of the fact that you're hooked up to an IV and I need your help."

"Should I be flattered?"

"No," he says, and slams the chair back down. "Considering the quantity of gear that was found on you, you should be grateful you're not headed to the cells."

Sherlock looks at him. "For god's sake, man. Get to the point."

"Help us out, and I'll clear it all away. You can't say fairer than that."

Sherlock laughs, but it becomes a cough. "What...what would that help entail?"

"Have a look at the body. Hell, take us on a guided tour. Talk to your—to the homeless fellows. They actually seem to trust you. Said you did them favours. Do me a favour, and there might be something in it for you."

"Get me out of here," Sherlock says, "and I'll consider it."

"I think you've got a few more days in hospital coming, mate. I don't know what you took, but it damned near killed you."

"Cocaine and morphine." Sherlock can admit (to himself) that he can't quite remember what had made that seem like a good idea. He doesn't, in fact, remember doing it, but he can read a medical chart.

"That was stupid."

"I thought you sought me out because you needed my assistance. If you want to take petty jabs at someone's intellect, I'd suggest you take a long hard look at your own organisation."

Lestrade cracks a mirthless smile. "Clean up. If you're good, I'll bring you some photographs tomorrow."

"And if I cooperate? If I solve this for you...?"

He hears a puff of breath. "Maybe I'll ask you to do it again. Maybe we can use someone like you. Damned if I know how you do it, but you're never wrong."

Sherlock looks at him, takes in the stubble on his jaw, the lines under his eyes.

"Get off the drugs, though. That's my condition, and I'll hold you to it."

"In exchange for work."

"Seems to me you have nothing better to do. You haven't, have you?"

Sherlock closes his eyes.

"Get some sleep," Lestrade says. "I'll be back tomorrow."

* * *

The gradual reassertion of ordinary neurochemistry is painfully predictable. Focus is elusive, and his thought processes jangled. Despite this handicap, Sherlock obtains results very quickly. Solving the first murder is child's play, for all that the body had been steeped in sewage for days. Sherlock has an unfortunate and  visceral reaction to the smell of decomposing flesh, but that's something he puts down to the physical aspects of withdrawal. Lestrade does not comment on this; he merely accepts the information as it is delivered.

The DI is true to his word, and over the long weeks, Sherlock is provided with cold cases to peruse while he repairs himself. These are a welcome distraction. Grey days are punctuated with lightning streaks of deduction. Soon he is able to drown out the constant whisper of receptors desperate for a substance they've been denied. The random drugs testing is only a minor indignity; a necessary exchange for occupation. When his flat is searched, and it is, as a matter of course, they find nothing to reproach him with.

That doesn't mean it isn't there. The location varies, from time to time, but the details do not. It's a memento and a warning: a red leather box containing a hypodermic, a razor, and a vial of fine white powder wrapped in a scrap of paper. This is inscribed with two Greek words, and if Sherlock has forgotten their provenance, he hasn't deleted their meaning.

Lestrade begins to request Sherlock's presence on crime scenes with increasing regularity. The members of his murder team aren't entirely comfortable with the arrangement, but their superior makes it clear that Sherlock's involvement is not negotiable. "You don't have to like him," Lestrade tells them, and that's gratifyingly direct. It simplifies things.

Sherlock does people favours. Some of these transactions result in substantial reward. Access to pathology facilities, for example. Free meals, on a number of occasions. Information, when he needs it. Something that might, perhaps, be respect. Very rarely, he identifies admiration. It's not important. At the heart of it all, there's the Work: deductions to make and problems to solve.

He reforges himself in dedication to this and nothing else; emerges brilliant and gleaming like a needle or a knife. Sherlock Holmes is no one's brother, no one's servant, and no one's friend. He's a consulting detective, and he invented the job.


	14. Epilogue

 

_London, 2010_

* * *

The walk back to Baker Street is far more leisurely than their flight through the park had been. This pace suits the speed of Sherlock's thoughts: cautiously contemplative. John no longer limps, but Sherlock knows his flatmate has difficulty matching his stride at times. Now that they've slowed, he seems content to walk beside Sherlock without comment.

 _That was Victor Trevor,_ Sherlock had said by way of explanation, back at the fountain. John had let the matter drop.

Sherlock considers Victor now; not the boy of twenty, but the man he saw today: Tall, pale, but with a clear history of long exposure to a sun that wasn't English. He was dressed in an expensive tweed suit, cut to fit him perfectly, but many years ago. Now it's soft and worn, bagging at the elbows and knees. His shoulders were bent, over the dog, and over the book; his hair, more dull flax than gold, falling over his brow in a shaggy sprawl that spoke of carelessness. His expression had been very serious, and that was strange, because the Victor Sherlock recalls best was often smiling. Hands bare, and fingers long, stroking over the wide pages of a braille text. And oh, there had been a brief curve of the lips at something he'd read, and that was very familiar, indeed.

It was strange, to see him thus and identify the outline of a space where feeling used to be.

When Sherlock first noticed the man with the dog, he couldn't contextualise him. His significance slowly surfaced in a series of jumbled images from the past. A dog. A chapel, at university. Vergil. Clay beneath fingernails. Stars on a ceiling. Skin under hands. A tree. A rusted watch. Words, twisted together in an indecipherable mass, piling up against a wall before they could take meaningful form.

 _The dog is wrong,_  Sherlock thought, unexpectedly.  _But Gladys must be long dead._

It was only then that he remembered her owner's name. Getting hold of the rest of it was difficult, and had to be approached obliquely. Sherlock kept slamming into the edges of cordoned off areas; entire rooms of data that he had apparently assigned to deletion. Bit by bit, the fragments slid through, and as they unfurled, he'd begun to understand why it had seemed so necessary to forget. He and Victor had been friends. They had been—Well. Whatever they were, that was long ago, and now such things belong to an arena Sherlock chooses not to enter.

* * *

They're back at Baker Street now, and Sherlock has his feet hooked over the back of the sofa, letting the blood drain down into his head. John wrinkles his nose at him, and hands him a freshly made cup of tea.

"If you can drink it in that position," he says, "I'll be astounded."

Sherlock can do without a scalding, so he arranges himself otherwise.

John plonks himself down into his chair, with a gratified sigh. "Keeping up with you is like a training manoeuvre," he remarks. "I think I need better shoes."

"Could be worse," Sherlock says.

John snorts. "It could always be worse."

"Complaining?"

"Not me." He takes a sip of his own tea, and Sherlock watches his brow crinkle into a series of fascinating folds. "Actually, yes. Take that...thing out of the bathtub. Then I won't complain."

"Experiment," Sherlock says. "It's only a shirt."

John nods. "What's it floating in?"

"Manganese."

"Oh, well then. That's all right. Only I fancy a bath, later on. Without manganese, if at all possible."

"It's an ordinary part of the water supply, John. I merely raised the concentration."

"Minimal manganese, then," John amends, and laughs. "Please?"

Sherlock finds it odd, the way his own mouth tends to quirk up in response when John smiles.

It is strangely easy to live with another person like this; someone who is simultaneously ordinary and unfathomable. John feels free, as no one ever has, to shove Sherlock out of the way without apology when he wants to watch television. John wears hideous jumpers, types with two fingers, and insists on regular meal times. He eats beans on toast, and worries about money. When they were in the park, John had attempted to entice Sherlock into eating crisps he didn't want.

This is something he's started doing recently, and Sherlock finds it alternately irritating and fascinating. He has no idea why John does it; why biscuits sometimes appear next to the microscope, or why apples occasionally make their way onto the mantelpiece, beside the skull. Sometimes Sherlock eats them, but he tries not to be predictable in doing so. He isn't entirely sure why that's important. It simply is.

John is very straightforward, and when he makes up his mind about something, very determined. He is not easily intimidated; certainly not by Mycroft, or Lestrade, or even Sherlock himself. When Sherlock annoys him, he says so, and waits, lips folded down and hands on hips, for his mistake to be rectified. John can—and this is, perhaps, the best thing—shoot a man, joke about it, and carry on as if it's perfectly fine.

It is better than fine. It's extraordinary.

Sherlock has burnt, flayed, dissolved, dissected, and dismembered human bodies. Cadavers, all. He's never killed anyone, no matter what Donovan likes to suggest. John's ability to shoot; to judge correctly in an instant, and follow through without hesitation, is awe-inspiring.

John Watson is extraordinary. Sherlock will almost certainly never say this to him, and sometimes, briefly, he makes the mistake of forgetting it. When he remembers, he is thankful for this: that John is precisely what he appears to be, simultaneously simple and complex. He is a man that can be relied upon. He is, in fact, a friend.

Sherlock sets down his tea and goes to drain the bath. He is undecided on the question of scrubbing it out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to drop the last three chapters all at once, in a bundle. I’m sorry about the wait, but it seemed like the best way to do this. Perhaps I was afraid you’d all run screaming after chapter 12. ;)
> 
> I leave a lot of questions unanswered, I know. Hopefully that works. Sherlock is not a reliable narrator. I’ve very deliberately chosen to keep things within his perspective, which is often very narrow. I am always intrigued by perceptual filters: what we see, what we do not, what we see and deny, and what we see without conscious comprehension but understand later (imperfectly). 
> 
> Chapter 13 exists in snapshots between years. I could spend ages filling in the space around them. Some of it exists quite solidly in my head, and you may see pieces in future.
> 
> I’ve enjoyed writing Victor. He will return elsewhere, and soon. A bit changed, of course, by the years: just like everybody else.
> 
> Thank you, dear readers, for your patience and encouragement along the way. I cannot adequately express how helpful your comments have been. You help fuel the addiction.
> 
> Most of all, I must thank WhenISayFriend, who has been a fantastic sounding board, sanity beacon, and accomplice. You’re insightful, hilarious, and far too forgiving of my tendency towards impatience. I’m afraid I’ve done it again...It’s in my nature.

**Author's Note:**

> Now added to Songs of Expedience, because it belongs there.


End file.
